


Author Commentary: Phase 1

by Nyxelestia



Series: Winter Wolves DVD Extras [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, teen wolf - Fandom
Genre: Author Commentary, Family Feels, Friendship, Gen, History, Other, Pack Feels, Stilinski Family Feels, Team Feels
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-18
Updated: 2018-03-09
Packaged: 2019-03-06 08:29:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 33,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13407363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nyxelestia/pseuds/Nyxelestia
Summary: Exactly what it says on the can: author commentary on my Winter Wolves series. This is the story, reiterated with my research, history, information, data, thought processes, intentions, and things I regret writing, can be improved, or basically just any comments I have on my writing.





	1. Snowflakes, Chapter 3 - (Steve) The Night Before

**Author's Note:**

> Restarting this author commentary so that it's all the Phase 1 stories together, instead of having separate commentaries. Originals can be found [here](http://archiveofourown.org/series/432529).
> 
> Will attempt to post in-tandem with Phase 1.

Steve didn't blame Tony for his paranoia, his fears of losing the Avengers. As irritating as Tony's demands for updates and check-ins occasionally got, Steve couldn't find it in himself to genuinely resent his regular phone calls to Tony.

> **There's a difference between "finding a person's actions irritating" and "finding _that person_ irritating".**

They were their own brand of soothing. Tony wanted the call mostly to hear Steve's voice and check that it was actually him. After, he mostly just wanted someone to talk at, and didn't seem to mind that Steve wasn't really listening to him. Steve often donned his headset or put his phone on speaker and set it aside, letting Tony's chattering wash all over him as he sketched a bit before bed.

> **I think people really underestimate introverted/extroverted friendships can and do work well together, without one trying to change or influence the other.**

It reminded him of late nights spent lurking in the quieter corners of whatever basement Howard had commandeered during the war. Steve had spent many a restless night doodling, finishing paperwork, or reading while Howard spoke in grumbling math and excited scientific jargon that rarely even sounded like English to Steve's untrained ears. Sometimes, if there was a couch, Steve would even doze or nap in there, listening to the genius inventor and his team of other geniuses as they worked deep into the night, the gentle cacophony lulling Steve to sleep.

Steve knew better than to mention or admit this to Tony, but he took what little comforts he could when he found them.

> **My subtle way of having Steve balance who Howard was to him vs who Howard was to Tony.**

"...so Dummy has lost his fire-extinguisher privileges. Again," Tony said, concluding a story about some new joint mechanism for his latest suit. "But on the bright side, I actually got some ideas for on-board dispersal-based weapons. I wouldn't be able to carry any kind of fire-suppressants on me, but maybe if I integrated the repulsor with an aeration system, I might be able to help put out fires and shit when I'm Iron Man."

> **I wrote this thing and I have no idea how Dummy managed to lose his fire-extinguisher privileges. :P**

"That would be useful," Steve interjected distractedly, squinting at the boxy lamp in his motel room as he tried to draw it. Still-life drawings were not his forte in the slightest, which is why he did so many of them - he needed the practice.

Tony sighed. "That's a while off, yet. Maybe a project for next week, since tomorrow I have to fly out to Colorado and Detroit to evaluate some properties for factory investment."

"Sounds...interesting," Steve said, to which Tony snorted. "Why Detroit?"

"That city went to shit a few decades after you went down in the ice," Tony said. "And never bounced back."

> **I like those cheesy fanfic tropes of Tony investing in seemingly stupid things for humanitarian reasons, only for it to turn out well anyway because fanfic. I just...took a slightly more realistic take on how that would look.**
> 
> ****

The other reason Steve appreciated this phone-calls was Tony's refusal to be gentle about Steve's history. He was neither cruel nor excessive about it, but he didn't walk around Steve on egg-shells or try to sugarcoat anything, either. When surrounded by people who seemed convinced that Steve would hide away from his phone and not know how to use a washing machine, someone heedlessly making Pilates jokes was a relief.

"I guess if anyone could use some investment, it would be Detroit," Steve said.

> **Back in WWII, Detroit was known as the Arsenal of Democracy.**
> 
> ****

"I'll be headed out to Malibu from there," Tony continued. "So you can end your road-trip crashing at my place. What about you? What've you got planned?"

> **Also a subtle reminder of when this takes place: not just after the Battle of New York, but also well before Iron Man 3.**

Steve sighed, glancing over at his tablet. The screen was currently dark, but if Steve flicked it on, he would find himself reading all about Bucky's sisters, all over again.

"I found the last descendent of Bucky's family," Steve said. "So I'm going to go visit tomorrow."

"Sounds...maudlin," Tony said, and Steve could easily imagine the distasteful wrinkle of his nose at that.

"Probably," Steve said. "But I just...I have to, if only to give myself closure."

"Is that what you're expecting?" Tony asked. There was the sound of clinking metal in the background, followed by one of the bot's whirring and chirping.

> **Some people really need another person's undivided attention to talk about important things, while others can _only_ talk if the other person's attention (and/or their own) is a little divided. Sometimes it's easy to open up your mind when your senses or hands are focused on something else. Tony knows this.**

"I think so," Steve said. "I mean...probably I'll tell him some stories, get some photographs, and that will be that."

"'Him'?"

"Yeah," Steve said. "Just one survivor left, one of Bucky's sister's grandson. He's fifteen."

"His mother?"

> **Doylist explanation: I forgot that Steve hadn't actually mentioned who "Bucky's sister's" _child_ was, only her grandchild. Whoops.**
> 
> **Watsoninan explanation: Tony was keeping tabs on Steve, knew what he was doing while traveling the country, and knew full well about Bucky's family before Steve said a word about it. This was Tony slipping up by saying "mother" when he shouldn't have known who the surviving descendant's deceased parent was. Steve just isn't used to picking people's words apart like this, so he didn't notice what Tony accidentally revealed.**

"Dead," Steve said bluntly, setting down his pencil to stare sightlessly at the muted television, which was showing some local news-story about a high school baseball game. "I missed her by a few years."

"I'm sorry," Tony said. Despite it being said dismissively and in passing, Steve believed him when he said it - in part because the amount of sincerity was limited. It was limited because it was real. Tony was not one for white lies to make people feel better.

"It's fine," Steve said. "I'll meet the kid - teenage boys like war stories, right? Bucky and his sisters were all packrats, so there might be some pictures or something lurking around there somewhere, who knows." With a shrug that Tony couldn't see, he concluded, "It'll probably be a nice but awkward visit, after which we'll never have to see each other again."

> **My vague handwaving for why there would be random crap from seventy years and three thousand miles ago in Stiles' attic.**

"Anything in particular you're hoping to find?" Tony asked.

Steve sighed. "I just...I want to know that..." Steve took a deep breath. "Everything Bucky did, it was for the people he loved. Me, his ma, his sisters...I want to know that Bucky did good by his sisters, that they lived well after the war and after losing us. Anything else will be a pleasant surprise, but as long as I get to check in on them on Bucky's behalf, I'll call it a success."

> **Some soldiers for their loved ones back home. Others fought for the guys standing next to time. Most (like Bucky) did both.**

"And after that?" Tony asked.

"Down to Fresno to meet Jim's family and get those pictures," Steve said. The Moritas had already contacted Steve - through SHIELD - and had a shoebox of wartime photos Jim'd taken and left to them.

> **When Steve was looking through those SSR files in the first Avengers movie, Jim Morita and James Falsworth were noted as 'deceased' but not the others (Dum Dum, Gabe, Jacques). ~~So basically every Howling Commando named James was dead, the rest lived.~~**

"As soon as you get to my place, we'll digitize them all," Tony said.

"I like having the physical pictures," Steve began.

"I believe you," Tony said. "Nah, this isn't to replace them, just keep them safe. Once they're digitized, they can be backed up online and sent instantly around the world. No matter what happens to the physical copies, there will be digital copies waiting for you, somewhere."

> **Tony can do the balancing act, too. Just because he's moving forward and thinking about the future doesn't mean he's forgetting about or ignoring the past (or present).**

Steve blinked at the TV, then smiled.

"Thank you," he said. "I appreciate it."

Somewhere in Tony's lab, Steve heard JARVIS speaking, then Tony sighing.

"Guess I gotta go to bed, so I can be presentable for tomorrow," Tony grumbled. "See you in about three weeks?"

> **Honestly, it just killed me that we saw so little of Tony and Steve's relationship in the movies, yet they were supposed to still have this strong friendship whose destruction hurt them both in Civil War. So this is me building up that friendship between them ~~so that it hurts more when it goes up in flames~~.  >:)**

"It's a date," Steve said, and tried not to choke as he ended the call.

Just because he missed his date with Peggy didn't mean all his social engagements from here on out were useless.

He'd spend an awkward day in Beacon Hills tomorrow, swing by Fresno, and probably be able to intercept Tony on his way to the mansion in Malibu.

Really, what else could happen?


	2. (Steve) Arriving in Beacon Hills

It was mid-afternoon by the time Steve Rogers drove into Beacon Hills, legs stiff from hours on the road and shirt sticking to his skin. He took it slow on the highway into town to admire the beautiful forest surrounding the county, but eventually the midsummer heat became too much for him. He pulled into a small business-looking district, driving through the outer edges of the town until he’d at least given a cursory-glance at all the motels the town had to offer. He wanted to know where to go later tonight.

> **Believe it or not, I originally had planned to start this story with Steve just pulling up to the Stilinskis’ house, but it seemed a bit _too_ out of the blue and I ended up throwing all this extra stuff in, namely to set the scene and give both Steve and the reader a better idea of what they were walking into.**

****  


For now, he found a dive bar to hole up in through the midafternoon heat.

He parked his bike in the barebones shade of a wilting tree, breathing in a sigh of relief as he adjusted the shoulder straps of his backpack for the first time in over a hundred miles.

> **Is 100 miles really such a long distance for non-Americans? Apparently, it’s really weird for some non-American readers that Steve would drive a hundred miles in one go, but I’ve done twice that multiple times in my life ( _quadruple_ that multiple times in my life if you don’t count 5-10 min bathroom breaks). And slight 5B spoiler, but it’s absolutely feasible that Scott and Stiles could’ve driven from California to New Mexico overnight, especially since they can switch off on driving and were going to stop as little as possible.**

****  


The bar wasn’t completely empty, but it was empty enough that Steve had no problem ordering a dark beer and some garlic fries as he curled in on himself at a table in a shadowy corner of the bar, keeping the bill of his hat low enough to obscure his face without making it too obvious he was trying to hide.

> **Have you seen that “Team Ballcap” thing? Like, Steve wearing a cap, Bucky wearing a cap, Sam wearing a cap…yeah, I absolutely believe this is the reason. You’d be amazed at how much you can hide yourself and your face with just a bit of clever angling, and no one even realizing it.**

****  


Half the other patrons were also on their own, most reading something on a smart phone, though there were a few pairs of friends quietly chatting as well. It was the slow hour after lunch but before people got off of work, and Steve made a mental note to leave once rush hour started.

He waited until the beer and fries arrived before pulling out his tablet. A password, a number code, and a finger print scan, and he was in, yet again perusing the files on Beacon Hills.

> **This was originally several paragraphs of what SHIELD thought of Beacon Hills historically, and a lot of Steve repeatedly running into redacted files and eventually giving up. But that conflicted too much with what I planned later so I cut it out and made it this vague little paragraph below.**

****  


For a small town where nothing happened, a lot sure seemed to happen. It had a long history of unusual crimes and bizarre animal attacks, enough that SHIELD had the town on its radar - even after the deaths of a family full of people who SHIELD suspected of being not quite human.

> **But not TOO vague. If you pay attention to Chapter 4 (and Chapter 5, once it comes out), no one ever says Derek’s last name when talking about him to Steve. Or any of the Hales’ last names at all. And they’re not going to, not until [REDACTED], at which point Steve will [REDACTED]. >:)**

****  


Steve read through the speculation that perhaps certain myths in human history came from a grain of truth. That maybe humans weren’t the only intelligent or humanoid species on Earth. That maybe various terrorist groups through modern history - dating all the way back to HYDRA - were on to something when they investigated mythology to see where it ran right into history.

> **So, popular history states that the Nazis were obsessed with the occult. This both was and was not true. The Ahnenerbe was originally founded to study “Aryan history” and basically prove white people once ruled the world and basically justify the Nazi regime. It just so happens that Heinrich Himmler, the guy who founded and ran it, was really into occultism, so he turned it into his own personal occult and pseudo-science research society. The Ahnenerbe was what HYDRA was based off of, except instead of just occult, they found and used alien technology. However, the Nazis as a whole were not necessarily all that preoccupied with the occult as popular culture would have you believe.**

****  


One would think humanity would have learned its lesson after the Tesseract.

> **Steve has way too much faith in humanity.**

****  


Still, Steve wasn’t here to investigate. SHIELD didn’t even know he was here, and if they did, Tony and Fury were running interference at his request. Nothing short of a life or death emergency would call Steve back to work.

He was kind of regretting that, right now.

> **You know you’re emotionally constipated when you’d rather fight off an alien invasion again than go over to someone’s house and say ‘hi’.**

****  


With a frown, he flicked his way through various files and folders, meticulously organized the way he liked it after weeks of work, until he came to civilian background checks.

It had been the only way to learn what had come of his friends - his friends, and the closest thing to family he’d ever had after his own parents died.

Since Bucky had been Steve’s next of kin, both their survivor’s benefits had gone to the Barnes family. The Barnes ladies, really, since Bucky’s own father had died in an accident on an army base years before the war even started. Mrs. Barnes had lived long enough to see all of Bucky’s sisters to adulthood, a nurse and a teacher and a secretary. Unfortunately, Anna died in a car crash, and the shock of losing her only son and youngest daughter seemed to have led to Mrs. Barnes dying of grief. Sarah and Rebecca both married, only for Sarah’s son to die in Vietnam.

> **In the movie, they state that Bucky was the oldest of four children.  
> **   
>    
>    
>    
>  **For the purposes of this story, I made the rest girls, and only one have a surviving descendent to this day (I thought briefly about giving Stiles a distant cousin or something, before remembering/realizing he was already pretty distant from Bucky).  
> **   
>  **In the comics, Bucky had a single sister named Rebecca, so as the character with actual canon, I used her as Stiles’ grandmother.  
> **   
>    
>    
>    
>  **Sarah and Anna were entirely my own creations (and using basically the really common names of the time period, which is why I used Sarah even though that’s already Steve’s mom’s name - I actually have some ‘shared name’ jokes lined up and I’m currently trying to find a way to work them into the story at some point.)**

****  
**  
**  
**  
**  
****  
  


War seemed to kill all the Barnes boys.

> **Oh, Steve, by the time I’m done with everyone, you’re going to WISH that war killed the Barnes boys.**

****  


It was just as well that Rebecca only had one daughter, Claudia, who escaped any kind of violent ending, only to die of some kind of dementia not too long ago.

> **How DID she die? We know that she attacked Stiles at some point and had delusions about him. Is Stiles believing he killed her (if the hallucinations from Season 2 are anything to go by) just misplaced guilt, or did he actually have a role in her death? SO MANY QUESTIONS. Stilinski fam, y u so mysterious? (…no, but seriously, how can we get so much screen time with them and know so little about them -[like their first names](http://nyxelestia.tumblr.com/post/126465221695/does-anyone-else-ever-think-about-how-weird-it-is)?!)**

****  


Steve had missed Bucky’s niece by just a few years.

Hopefully her young boy - the one whose name Steve could not for the life of him pronounce - would escape the life of war and suffering that seemed to hang over the family like some kind of curse.

> **> :)**

****  


Bucky’s only family left - _Steve’s_ only family left - was a teenage boy in Beacon Hills, Bucky’s grand-nephew. There wasn’t much about him. Diagnosed with some kind of attention disorder as a child, but he seemed to get good grades all the same. He had a ‘Facebook’, which didn’t tell Steve much other than the fact no one else could pronounce his name, either, if the nickname was anything to go by.

> **Still not sure what do for Stiles’ name. Do I go with the fandom keysmash, or do I take into account the initial we saw on his ID card in Season 5? ID cards, school ID cards, REALLY don’t work like that, so I’m just so damn tempted to ignore it. But there’s been so much interesting meta about what Stiles’ name could be…**

****  


He was about to start the tenth grade, his sophomore year. Steve barely remembered being fifteen, himself - it felt like so long ago. The kid’s Facebook was full of pictures and posts about him and a friend planning to spend the fall training up so they could make the school’s lacrosse team come winter try-outs. Seeing the picture of two teenagers slurping at smoothies while making faces at a camera - or, in all likelihood, camera- _phone_ , because that was a thing in the twenty-first century…

It just made him miss Bucky, and made him realize how much he couldn’t back down from this, now.

> **Full disclosure, this story was originally going to be Sciles. Not very shippy, granted, because this fic isn’t very shippy in general - it’s team/pack fic and family feels, so friendship and family were always going to be the focus of the series, not romance, romantic relationships, or permanent peer partners of any kind. On top of that, I’m just not a romantic/shippy writer in general. Since there was so little romance at the time, I made it gen, except no one reads genfic. I started to get way too many hilarious ideas Steve seeing Stiles flail around Derek and Stiles’ having a ~thing~ for nice arms, leading to the Thor jokes, and that’s how this story became a Sterek fic.**

> **THEN around the time I was debating going back to making this a gen fic, I ran into a lot of meta about how even if HYDRA never raped the Winter Soldier/had actual Trash Parties, what they DID do (as seen or directly implied in canon, or implied via comics canon) most closely mimics sexual abuse _anyway_ , and suddenly I got another subplot in which Derek and Bucky bond over their share violation/abuse histories when they [REDACTED]. Whoops.**

> **It’s still probably going to be Scott & Stiles centric (since Bucky and Steve are such a central relationship to the series, too), and the Sterek is probably going to be very QPR-ish, in that there probably won’t be much “romance” because romance bores the hell out of me. I like romance best when it’s like the best friendship ever with some sex and kissing thrown in at the end. So when I do romance, I do so via slow build. And as anyone who’s followed my Virtues, Chicken, and Destiny series in Merlin fandom knows, when I say slow build, I _mean_ slow. (That thing’s been running for half a decade, now). But Derek is kind of like Natasha to Stiles’ Bucky (in the comics), if you want a better gist of how the relationship dynamics will pan out.**

There was nothing in these files to help Steve, nor anything online. Nothing that could tell Steve how he should go up to the last hanging thread of Bucky’s family and introduce himself and…what? There was nothing Steve could give them, nothing to be gained, and would probably just open up some scarred-old wounds to boot.

But Steve couldn’t just forget about him, either.

With a frustrated grunt, Steve shut everything down and off, stuffing the tablet away as he quickly finished the last dregs of his drink and the few fries left. He paid in cash, telling the waitress to keep the change as a tip, and quickly left just as the first of the after-work crowd started pulling into the parking lot.

It took a while to get around town. Steve tried to tell himself he was just enjoying the view, but he knew he was lying to himself.

He was a damn coward.

Eventually, though, he made himself pull up to modest house in a nice part of town, parking his bike carefully and sitting on it for a moment as he glanced at the old but cared-for SUV sitting in the driveway.

> **I never understand why people seem to think the Sheriff just uses a department SUV for his own, personal travels. Those are WORK vehicles, he can’t use them when he’s off-duty. Not to mention that even after the Sheriff was fired, we see that he still has the SUV.**

****  


“C’mon, punk,” he muttered to himself. Finally, he unhooked the helmet - originally bought for state law compliance and surprisingly useful in hiding in plain sight. He locked it to the bike, shouldered his bag, and pushed himself up the little walkway to the front door, slowing as he heard the sounds of a movie playing inside.

> **This, believe it or not, marks one of the biggest differences between the Stucky and Sciles friendships. Both are equally loving, but Sciles is a lot less name-calling and affectionately insulting each other, and a lot more mutually uplifting support. I mean, there is still teasing among the younger boys and no end of support among Steve and Bucky, but they ultimately still have very different personalities. For all the parallels I’m drawing, Scott and Steve are very different from each other, as are Bucky and Stiles. Stiles is the sarcastic one, while Scott is very much NOT, so Stiles would feel bad if he did that too much. With Steve and Bucky, neither of them are nearly as sarcastic as Stiles, but at the same time they’re both a little snarkier than Scott.**

****  


Some part of him still had trouble getting over the fact most people in America had televisions, now, that movies weren’t just something you went out to see, but also entertainment to enjoy at home.

> **Televisions _did_ exist and weren’t even all that uncommon during Steve’s day, but up until WWII, they were a little crude and mostly considered experimental technology, something the rich had as an expensive toy. They didn’t start becoming common in households until after WWII - as did household appliances and electronics in general.**

****  


Steve took a deep breath and rang the doorbell.

 _“Stiles!”_ he heard a man shouting from inside.

 _“Got it!”_ a young boy’s voice answered.

The sounds of the movie suddenly stopped, and a moment later the door opened, revealing a lanky teenage boy in long shorts and a tee-shirt, with short brown hair and Rebecca’s eyes.

> **For a while, I debated ‘changing’ either Bucky or Stiles’ canon eye-color to give them the same color eyes. In the end, I opted for realism, as well as avoiding too many similarities. Parallels are good and all, but only so far as the supplement a story, not overtake it. Sometimes, characters have connections to other or unexpected sources, and no parallel is perfect - otherwise, they would be the same exact thing, and that’s hella boring.**

****  


“Yes?” the boy asked.

“Um…are you…” Steve swallowed. “Are you, uh, Stiles Stilinski?”

The boy’s eyes immediately narrowed, and even if he had Rebecca’s eyes, that was Bucky’s scrutiny staring Steve back in the face.

> **But there still needs to be SOME similarity. A healthy suspicion of the world at large is a Barnes family trait, which is probably why Claudia and the Sheriff got along so well. :P**

****  


God, barely a minute in and Steve felt like he was drowning in memory.

“Who wants to know?” the boy asked.

“Stiles?” the man’s voice from earlier called out. “Who is it?”

A moment later, a man in jeans and a loose shirt appeared behind the boy, expression equally wary. “Can we help you?” the man asked - the boy’s father, and Beacon Hills’ town Sheriff.

Steve swallowed, every single line and plan going out the window.

He’d been spending over a month mentally planning for and dreading this moment, and now that he was finally here, it was like he was shriveled and socially awkward all over again.

He never felt so tiny since he’d become so large.

> **I’m on the fence about a subplot. It doesn’t really add anything to the story, but I wanted to give Steve a sort of light body dysmorphia, him and Scott. While the details are different, they would both have issues of sort of missing their old/“real” body, even though their ‘new’ ones are so much better. It feel like it would clutter up the story, though.**

****  


Before he could try to come up with something, the boy’s eyes widened, and his mouth fell open in shock as recognition filled his eyes. His entire stance grew straighter, and he pointed dumbly at Steve’s face as he said, “You’re- no, no way, why-”

“My name is Steve Rogers,” Steve said finally. “I don’t know if you’ve heard about-”

“You’re Captain America!” the boy shouted in disbelief.

> **Stiles was absolutely a Captain America fanboy even before he met Steve.**

****  


Steve smiled and nodded sheepishly. He glanced at the sheriff, whose eyebrows were also going up as he looked Steve over, and then looked back at the boy.

> **It’s the Sheriff’s fault. :P**

****  


“Yeah, I…I am. The original one,” Steve added, focusing on the boy. “Your grand-uncle…Bucky Barnes was my best friend growing up, and his family practically adopted me when my own died. I…I always planned to come back to his family, even after he died. When I…woke up, a few months ago, I looked for his family. And that’s…well, you.”

Stiles’ mouth opened and closed as he gaped in shock.

The silence was so awkward, Steve was one step away from apologizing for taking their time and leaving, before Mr. Stilinski sighed and said, “Come on in, then.”

Mr. Stilinski had to nudge the boy’s shoulder to get him to step back, but after a moment he shook his head and moved, still gaping at Steve as he stepped into the household and, seeing a rack on the floor, toed off his shoes.

“I apologize for dropping in like this,” Steve said, trying to loosen his grip on his bag. “But I didn’t really know how else to do this.”

“Where’s your shield?” the boy blurted out.

> **Tony and SHIELD are scanning it and generally studying it when Steve isn’t using it, since now that Tony can _make_ vibranium, they might be able to make more shields. Of course, it turns out largely to be pointless - very few people can even use Steve’s shield, since it requires a certain level of superhuman strength, and vibranium can be so much more useful in so many other forms, anyway, and it’s difficult to manufacture in the kind of bulk needed to make the shield, and if it’s really that vibration absorbent, it’s _very_ difficult to forge or work with. Howard most likely made it as a kind of challenge to himself, not out of any expectation for it to be useful.**

****  


Mr. Stilinski’s expression abruptly shifted from wary to exasperated as scolded, “Stiles!”

Steve smiled softly at the sheepish look on Stiles’ face. The innocent curiosity of excited kids was a lot less grating than the probing of adults.

“Kind of hard to carry without drawing attention, so it’s at Stark Tower while I’m traveling.” 

Stiles led Steve into the living room, gesturing towards the couch. On the table, there was a half-empty bottle of beer and a glass of what looked like lemonade, and a bowl of chips and a pillow on the floor. Stiles darted over the television to switch it off. Steve caught a glimpse of a rugged man in a fedora before the screen went black. It was a bit flat - though not as flat as a lot of TVs were that Steve had been seeing, so likely a little older - and it sat like a silent, black hole on top of a little cabinet in the corner.

> **I really wish this came up more in Captain America fanfics. Seriously, people underestimate just how weird having screens everywhere must be, especially flat screens, to someone like Steve. He would’ve mostly or only ever watched movies projected onto white/“silver” screens, could probably count on one hand how many times they’ve seen an actual TV or screen-like viewing mechanism in his life prior to the war. Well, depending on what class you assume Steve to be, and what kind of stores he walked past a lot for most of his life - especially during the Great Depression.**

****  


The boy stood up, then glanced awkwardly around himself and at Steve. He glanced over Steve’s shoulder at - presumably - the sheriff, and that seemed to help him a little.

“Um, do you want a drink or something?” he asked. “We have water - but, uh, everyone has water, I guess - and we have orange juice and pomegranate juice and some lemonade and Coke and I think we might have a Sprite or two but I would have to double check, and we can probably make, like, coffee and stuff-“

“The man can’t tell you what he wants if you don’t let him,” Mr. Stilinski chided.

“I’m fine,” Steve said, not bothering to hide his small smile. At least he wasn’t the only awkward one here. Stiles reminded Steve of Bucky, before he really got a grasp of the family’s signature charm. “I don’t want to cause too much trouble or anything.”

“Um, dude, pouring out drink isn’t exactly trouble,” Stiles said, looking at Steve like he was slightly dim.

> **Stiles you lil shit-**

****  


Rebecca used to do that all the time.

“Stiles…” Mr. Stilinski said warningly.

Steve chuckled. “True, but I try to be polite.” He swallowed. “Seems a little late for coffee or soda, I don’t know if you just have lemonade or orange juice or if you would have to pour it out of something, and I’ve never even had pomegranate juice, so…water is always the safest bet.”

Stiles smiled. “Pomegranate juice it is, since you’ve never tried it.”

> **-but he’ll be Steve’s lil shit. And Bucky and Steve were the ultimate little shits, anyway. :P**

****  


“Stiles!” Mr. Stilinski said, sounding so long-suffering Steve couldn’t help but laugh.

“It’s fine, sir,” Steve said, turning to look over his shoulder at Mr. Stilinski. “I can’t knock something until I’ve tried it.”

“I’ll bring some water in case you don’t like it,” Stiles said, slipping around the couch and disappearing into the kitchen.

Then it was just the two adult men in the living room, the only sound coming from Stiles rummaging around in the kitchen.

After a moment, the boy’s father sighed and came around the couch, dropping into a sofa and picking up the beer.

> **The Pack Papa Stilinski vibes here were absolutely intentional. I’m basically using this moment to imply that the family tradition of adopting stray angsty young’uns in need of a hug is still going strong. The Barnes family took Steve in once before, and they’re doing so again - and in both cases, the ‘parent’ doing the bulk of the adopting is someone who married into the family, not the one born into it. :P**

****  


“I suppose you’ve probably heard this before,” he said. “But thank you. For New York.”

“No thanks needed, sir,” Steve said, trying not to wince as he slipped into his pre-prepared response. “Anyone else in my position would’ve done the same, and all of us there did our part.”

> **Dealing with press and publicity is probably one of the few elements of his job still familiar to him. At least when he knows he’s on record, anyway - the hardest part, methinks, is remembering and getting used to the idea that he might always be on record, thanks to smartphones and social media.**

****  


Mr. Stilinski smirked. “That the party line?”

Steve almost went into press mode again, but then remembered this man was…well, he wasn’t the press, that was for sure.

“Sort of,” Steve said. “I got one hell of a briefing on how modern media works, and…prepared lines seemed like the best option.” He shrugged. “I’m used to it. Did it for the Army, too.”

“I’ll bet,” he said, taking a sip of his beer. “Given how hard they come down on us for talking outside party lines today, I imagine it would’ve been even worse during the war.”

> **Most people don’t realize this, but there are actually a LOT of rules about how much serving military personnel can be politically active, especially in topic areas concerning security and foreign policy. The military exists to carry out the Commander in Chief’s will. Now, soldiers can absolutely say they voted for the other guy than whoever is currently in the Oval Office and such - but their job is support whoever _is_ in office, because whoever is in the Oval Office now was put there by The People, who both the military and the President ultimately serve. They cannot advocate against military policy, their commander in chief, or otherwise undermine anything the military is doing (and generally speaking, political involvement even in non-military/foreign policy issues is frowned upon).**

****  


Steve blinked in surprise. “You served?”

> **I actually have SO MANY QUESTIONS about Sheriff Stilinski’s background in canon. Did he ever go to college? Or even community college? You don’t _need_ a degree to be a cop, but it can help and a lot of them do, especially if they ever hoped to work as a detective of some kind. Was the Sheriff ever a detective before he became a beat cop/deputy? Was he also an officer in the Army, or enlisted? An NCO? How long was he in the army before he left for civilian law enforcement? Was he an MP (Military Police) in the Army, or was Beacon Hills his first law enforcement experience?**

****  


He nodded. “Not long - just a few years after college. Couldn’t find a job at the time, and Stiles’ mother still had to finish school, so I enlisted to tide me over.” He snorted. “And while a lot of people slip through the cracks, the Army is just as big on presenting a united front during peace time as they were during war. Luckily, they support a policy of soldiers not talking to the press at all if they can help it.”

> **I kind of headcanon that the Sheriff was actually still in the army when he married Claudia and they had Stiles, but Stiles was still so young when the Sheriff left the army for civilian life that he doesn’t really remember or think of his father as being in the army.**

****  


“Wish I had that,” Steve said softly. “Would’ve saved me a lot of trouble.”

Stiles came back in carrying two cups, one of a pinkish-red drink and the other of clear water with ice in it. He handed Steve the juice while setting down the water on the coffee table.

Steve took a sip of the pomegranate juice as Stiles dropped onto the other end of the couch, and hummed in appreciation. “Not bad,” he said, taking another sip to prove his point. And it wasn’t. Steve wasn’t sure if he actively liked it, yet, but he didn’t dislike it, either. More importantly, though, it was nothing he’d ever had to drink before the war and didn’t bring up memories of what it wasn’t or how it was supposed to taste.

> **Steve’s biggest problem with food wouldn’t be stuff that’s new and completely unrelated to food he grew up with - he’d approach new food in this day the same way he’d approach new food in his own time. No, his biggest problem would probably be food that’s similar to what he grew up with, since that would keep bringing up reminders or taste _different_ from what he knows.**

****  


That was a pretty big point in its favor.

> **No, but seriously, you’d be surprised what foods this entails. Case in point: bananas. The kind of banana Americans eat today is called a Cavendish banana, but we only started importing those after the kind of bananas Steve would’ve grown up with, Gros michel bananas, were wiped out by Panama disease.  
> **   
>    
>    
>  **At least in the Americas - they’re still around in Asia.  
> **   
>    
>    
>  **BANANA ANGST. BANANA ANGST IS A THING IN THIS FANDOM. On a completely unrelated note, Sebastian Stan - the actor for Bucky Barnes - is actually Romanian in origin. His family had to move out of Romania when he was 8 years old, and apparently seeing bananas for the first time at that age was a bit of ‘an event’ for him.**

****  
** **  
****  
  


> **This is actually something I’m familiar with - I grew up with at least half my high school being made up of first-generation or second-generation Americans, and a lot of kids mention similar things. (A friend of mine mentioned that he’d literally never seen a non-white person in his life until he was in an airport after his family had to flee Russia - he’d glimpsed them on TV and such, but never in person or seen one with his own eyes).**

****  


Stiles grinned. “It’s healthy, too!”

“Thank you,” Steve said, and took another sip because there wasn’t much else to do, now.

He wasn’t even sure what he came here for, let alone what he could or would ask of them.

Thankfully, though, Stiles was willing to fill the silence, saying, “So what do you do when you’re not fighting aliens?”

Mr. Stilinski looked up at the ceiling like he was praying for strength.

> **This is a very common look for him.**

****  


“Not much,” Steve said, trying not to laugh at the expression on Mr. Stilinski’s face. “They…they found me in the ice less than half a year ago. I spent the first few months recovering, trying to catch up on all the history I’ve missed and…training, honestly. Wasn’t sure what else to do. Then the Battle of New York happened, and since then I’ve just been traveling around the country…seeing things.”

> **I was actually really conflicted about the first line in this paragraph, because someone did a breakdown and found out that on-screen, Steve’s only smiled once since waking up in the 21st century - when he’s telling Tony they won after closing Loki’s portal. That’s the one time he smiles in the Avengers, and he never smiles at all in Captain America 2. But, since even people who actually have depression can still laugh and smile, I figured it’s not like Steve can’t feel some happiness, too. An unfortunate reality of depression is that sometimes “happy thoughts” or “happy moments” are not really enough to mitigate it, and that even if you don’t have depression, grief can easily still dominate your life even with love and happiness in your life. Steve is much closer to the rest of the Avengers in this series than in the movies, and has a lot more smiling and laughter in his life. But he still lost just about everyone he knew, and his own life - he has a lot to grieve, something that he may not even let himself have time for.**

****  


“Anything cool?” Stiles asked, leaning forward excitedly.

“Well, I got to see the Grand Canyon-”

“I did a report on it once!” the boy said eagerly. “For geography in fifth grade.”

“Don’t interrupt him, Stiles,” Mr. Stilinski said. He sounded like he didn’t expect the admonishment to stick at all.

> **The Sheriff thinks Stiles is a lost cause, but he still has try. Pay attention to canon, though, and Stiles is actually not nearly as much of a motor mouth as fandom makes him out to be. This is a carefully constructed misdirection on Stiles’ part, in fact. Stiles snarks back at people a lot, but he doesn’t initiate conversation nearly as much as people seem to think. He won’t start a conversation, but he’ll absolutely keep it going until he gets what he needs.**

****  


The boy pouted anyway, contrite. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay, I don’t mind,” Steve said. “It reminds me of your grandmother.”

“Really?”

“Really,” Steve said with a fond nod. “She always had something to say and was excited to say it. Bucky was always trying to get her to calm down…it never worked, though.”

> **I’m imagining that Stiles’ grandmother had ADHD. I might have Bucky show tinges of it, too, if I can work it in, between all the other crap he’s going to have to deal with. But, I’m actually not sure if Stiles has ADHD, and I headcanon that he doesn’t. We know at one point he takes Adderall, but we never find out if it’s his own prescription or just Adderall he bought from someone at school, and he doesn’t really show signs of ADHD. He may just be one of those kids that buys Adderall to help concentrate on important tests and projects, but Stiles’ priority just isn’t school so he uses it for other things, too.**

****  


Stiles grinned again, sheepish and shy but a little smug, too. “Cool.”

“Grand Canyon?” Mr. Stilinski offered, a bemused smile on his face as he apparently tried to help Steve.

Steve hesitantly launched into the story of how he and Bucky had always planned to go see the Grand Canyon when they were kids, and how Steve had gone now in his memory. He’d camped and hiked there a bit, sketched a fair amount and even started to get back into colored pencils while there.

> **When this fic was still in its earliest Sciles stages, I planned for it to end with Sciles and Stucky going on a hike in the Grand Canyon together (reminiscent of Steve’s Grand Canyon hike in the comics). I still might do that, actually. Even if Scott and Stiles aren’t romantically together, I still have a tendency to write them kind of QPR-ish/Heterosexual Life Partners (for a given value of heterosexual, anyway). I’m actually not even sure if I’ll make Stucky truly romantic/sexual Stucky, or full-blown QPR (which, let’s be real, is basically what they are in canon). Can you tell I’m aromantic? :P**

****  


That somehow devolved into talking about Steve’s drawing skills in general, his brief career in comics he’d just been starting before the war hit, how he’d done posters and pamphlets before Project Rebirth. It careened into a lot of talk about comic books in general, Stiles even running upstairs to grab some of his own to show Steve what they were like today, explaining digital art and how it was sometimes mixed with traditional art via scans and mixed-media.

> **I took 616 canon and made Steve a comic-book illustrator before the war. I originally had a subplot (which I might write anyway as a deleted scene) in which Steve is still drawing comics about his experiences, and Stiles puts them online, claiming to the Internet that he’s putting them there for his grand-uncle, a WWII veteran, and just never mentioning that it’s Steve. It…gets leaked, anyway, which caused too much chaos in the story so I ended up cutting it out, but then Stiles just posting Steve’s artwork online was largely pointless as a subplot, so the whole damn thing got cut out.**

****  


Before Steve knew it, it was dark out. Mr. Stilinski stood, twisting to crack his back slightly and disappearing into the kitchen with his empty bottle. He came back out a few moments later holding up a stack of worn-and weathered pamphlets and flyers.

“It’s almost dinner,” Mr. Stilinski said. “And you are absolutely welcome to join us, I mean it - but I also warn you that we’re going to have to order in. Been kind of a busy week, so we’re a little behind on the grocery shopping.”

Steve smiled a little wanly. “Sounds good to me, Mr. Stilinski.”

“Please, call me John. Or Sheriff, everyone does.”

> **Okay, while I’m here - if you look through the tags on that post about the Stilinskis' names, one of the number one responses is people saying they thought his name was John. It’s not, not in canon. Thus far, canon has not given us the Sheriff’s first name, or Stiles’ legal first name. ‘John’ most likely started as an actor shout-out to Linden Ashby’s other prominent role, Johnny Cage. (If you have not seen Mortal Kombat, I highly recommend you do and cackle about cheesy!BAMF!Sheriff all the way. I’m working on a Mortal Kombat/Teen Wolf crossover, actually, but that’ll be a long while in coming.) Anyway, that was probably how it started, and then it kept perpetuating because John is like the most normal, down-to-earth name a guy can have, which contrasts with not only Stiles’ name, but Teen Wolf in general. However, it is still technically fanon, just a widely-accepted one.**

****  


“Right, uh, then it sounds good to me, Sheriff,” Steve said. The man smiled approvingly as he dropped the pamphlets on the coffee table, spreading them out. Steve shook his head as he read the names and taglines of the various restaurants. “I still can’t believe this.”

“Believe what?”

He kept his eyes on the rather daunting pile of pamphlets and fliers. God, how did people manage to hold onto so many, so easily?

What if they wanted him to choose?

“When I was a kid, half this stuff was exotic and the other half was unimaginable,” Steve said. “You would’ve had to go to Chinatown for Chinese food, or a _really_ expensive restaurant. And things like Thai or Vietnamese…I never even knew they existed. And now they’re ordinary stuff.”

> **Thank you, immigration! Because imagine how boring contemporary American diets would be without it. No, seriously. *shudders***

****  


Stiles looked hesitantly at his father, and Steve winced. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to unload-”

“It’s cool,” Stiles said immediately. “Do you want…” He bit his lip. “Do you want something you’re used to, or something new?”

> **Thoughtful baby is thoughtful.**

****  


Steve blinked at him in surprise.

“…Captain?” Stiles asked.

“Call me Steve,” he responded. “And…you know, you’re the first person to actually ask me that?”

Both Stilinskis’ eyebrows rose in united incredulity. “Really?” the Sheriff asked.

Steve nodded. “Some people just assume I should be trying new things all the time, no matter what. Most just assume I want to stick to stuff I know.”

“Do you usually want something new or something old?” Stiles asked curiously, forgetting the menus spread out in front of him.

“Depends on my mood, I guess, but…it hasn’t really mattered in a while.” He looked down at all the menus. “I’m…somewhat familiar with Chinese food, but not very. I’m honestly not very sure where to start.”

> **Chinese people have been in America a long longer than most people realize. That said, most of the Asian-Americans Steve would’ve known in Roaring and Great Depression New York probably would’ve been Filipino.**

****  


Stiles dug right through all the menus, brandishing three of them and then discarding one. When Steve was still unsure, he handed them both to his father, who glanced at them and handed just one back, muttering about _that ginger chicken thing_.

> **Probably Sesame Ginger Chicken, since a stir-fry would not meet Stiles’ exacting health standards.**

****  


Steve fought down the strong urge to sigh in relief as Stiles handed him the lone menu pamphlet. At least he wouldn’t have to choose a restaurant to order from, and Stiles even started talking about the various options this particular place had, advising Steve to stay away from anything with the beef and that the seafood was usually hit or miss and that most of their noodles were delicious. Steve eventually settled on some chicken and noodle dish. It would probably be nothing like any chicken noodles Steve would’ve ever had, but it was close enough to familiarity that he could breathe easy as he dived into the unknown.

Mr. Stilinski went into the kitchen to call them place the order, and Stiles started stacking up the menus again, shuffling and moving them into some system comprehensible only to himself.

> **He organizes them by how long it takes for the food to get to his home from the moment he hangs up the phone after the order. Part length of time to make the food, part distances from the restaurant. In situations where they are approximately similar, Stiles then organizes by how healthy the food tends to be, in the hopes that his dad will get lazy and pick the first menu he runs into when Stiles isn’t there. It doesn’t work, because if Stiles isn’t home, the Sheriff just orders greasy pizza/fast food, anyway.**

****  


“So,” Stiles said, jerking his head towards the TV as he finished gathering up all the papers. “Wanna watch a movie?”

> **Because it’s so difficult to get Scott to watch Star Wars, Stiles compensates by getting everyone else to watch it, instead.**

****

~*~

Dinner was a thankfully calm and surprisingly enjoyable affair. Despite the fact Steve was a visiting guest, the Stilinskis seemed to realize how awkward trying to sit at a table and eat might be under the current circumstances.

> **Dinner table is for work. Coffee table is for dinner. Side tables are for coffee. In all seriousness, though, while coffee tables were around in Steve’s time, they weren’t all that common yet, especially in poorer living rooms/homes. Especially since I tend to headcanon the Barnes family (with Steve) living in a tenement home in the 1930s, which were small and looked a bit like this:  
> **   
>    
> 

“Eating dinner in the living room while watching something is pretty common, these days,” the Sheriff suggested as he unpacked all the little boxes out of the plastic bag they were delivered in. “Granted, that is incredibly informal, but something tells me you don’t really need formal right now.”

> **Steve is probably used to the idea of eating at places other than the dinner table - from working class to warzone, the Greatest Generation was not nearly as hung-up on table manners as popular media would have you believe.  
>  **

Steve smiled. “I really, really don’t.”

After five minutes of fretting, Stiles finally decided to put on a movie that turned out to be the one the rest of the Avengers wouldn’t shut up about.

> **Because Stiles isn’t the only one who makes Star Wars jokes that his best friend doesn’t understand. Tony makes all sorts of references in the hopes that Steve will ask about them and he gets to be the one to introduce Steve to something new. When you’re not just a Fake Geek Boy, there is no greater joy than being the one to introduce someone to something new (or drag someone kicking and screaming into a garbage can with you, depending on how you look at it), and Steve is a goddamn goldmine of opportunity for Tony. Though admittedly, Stiles showing Steve the Star Wars movies this early might be a little non-compliant with canon:  
> **   
>    
>    
> 

“Star Wars is like a cultural icon,” Stiles said, fiddling with the movie player - the DVD player - while the Sheriff plated the food in the kitchen. “Nearly everyone has seen it, and even if you haven’t - like my best friend, which is a serious error I need to correct - then most people usually know like the major characters and some plot points and stuff. There were three movies a few decades ago, which are the really famous ones, and then there was a prequel trilogy a few years ago but those sucked so everyone likes to pretend they just never happened…”

> **Stiles’ mother tried to protect her baby and lied about the existence of the prequels. Stiles appreciates the effort, but he also knows how annoying it is to find out you’ve been lied to your whole life. Look at Santa! Grr. But then he watched it and understood, so for Steve’s sake, he does a little bit of both, telling him about the originals and the prequels, but only showing him the originals.  
>  **

It was surprisingly peaceful, despite the fast-paced action of the movie. Steve and the Sheriff ate in peace while Stiles alternated between shoveling food into his mouth and explaining things in the movie, various references and how he shouldn’t get hung up on the romance of Luke and Leia and how everyone liked Chewbacca and why Steve just had to know that Han Shot First.

Stiles had definitely inherited the Barnes family gift of gab.

> **Even in the movie, Bucky was a bit more on the chatty side than Steve, and in comics this was turned up to eleven (but he also kinda _was_ eleven at the time, until people aged him up into a late teenager/barely adult because Values Dissonance). I get the feeling that Steve was the quieter one between the two of them for most of their friendship - but people didn’t notice because when Steve talked, he fucking _talked_ \- and _would not shut up_. Steve was either very quiet or very loud, whereas Bucky was more evenly talkative.  
>  **

By the end of the night, Steve felt the most relaxed he’d been since leaving the Grand Canyon. Mr. Stilinski had let Steve pay for his portion of the meal, so Steve had ordered and eaten enough to satisfy the supersoldier metabolism in one go without feeling guilty. They watched the whole movie through, and only paused to dump the plates in the sink and fetch some more drinks and chips. Stiles put on the second movie in the trilogy, too.

> **Later, Stiles will easily be able to cook for werewolves because he’s already used to Steve’s superhuman appetite, anyway.  
>  **

Steve was a contented drowsy by the end of the second movie, and he smiled when Stiles yawned, large and jaw-cracking, and promptly tried to pretend it hadn’t happened.

> **I was going to make a joke about stubborn teenagers, then I remember how often I fall asleep at a table because I’m too stubborn to admit I’m tired.  
>  **

The Sheriff didn’t let him. “Bed,” he ordered as he sat up from where he’d been slumped over, apparently half-asleep, on the big sofa-chair.

“But it’s summer! And it’s Friday!”

> **And summer school is over! Random: I actually wouldn’t be surprised if most of the teen wolves did summer school. In most of America, summer school is something associated with remedial classes and falling behind, but in California it’s actually really common for students to use summer school to get ahead of their requirements, get required classed out of the way to take more electives in the year, or to use a regular/high-school level class as a foundation for taking an Honors or AP class during the school year. And I outright assume Lydia did a LOT of summer school.  
>  **

> **Though as another side note, Lydia is _incredibly_ unlikely to be taking only one class during senior year, even if she is ready to graduate - unless she were actively doing something else to take up her time (work, volunteership, internship, etc.), then she would be taking at least half as many classes as everyone else (3-4 classes, since 6-8 per term is normal). They might be all AP if she took regular level classes before (which she had to have, since she at least took chemistry at the same level as Scott, Stiles, Allison, Erica, and Isaac, and I don’t think _all_ of them were AP or even Honors), and if she’d already taken the highest version of every course available, she’d be doing a lot of electives. Either way, she would NOT have “only one class” without some other _documentable_ duties. (The documentable part is important - even if she had supernatural plans, they wouldn’t have been something she could put down on paper.) If she really were able to graduate before, the school would’ve made her graduate, anyway - that or make her take a normal course load for senior year, none of this convenient in-between business. On top of that, California graduation requirements includes four years of English, regardless of what those English classes actually are, so even if she were only taking one class in senior year, it shouldn’t be biology - it should be English. The most realistic schedule for Lydia is simply a regular course schedule that’s all AP’s.  
>  **

> **The idea of Lydia having “only one class” is exceptionally stupid to me because the only reason they gave her so much free time is to justify her running around town during the day instead of being in school…but that’s only a few times, and it is far easier to believe she should just ditch. No, seriously. Out of all the regular class ditchers in my high school, only half are the kids who are going to drop out or otherwise don’t care about their grades; the other half are the smart kids who are ditching because they already know the material and have better things to do - which the teachers often know, so some teachers don’t even care too much if you ditch, as long as you get good grades. If there’s anyone who could miss classes and still maintain her grades, it’s Lydia.  
>  **

> **And I actually _went_ to the high school Teen Wolf is filmed at from Season 3 onwards, so I could even tell you exactly how she would ditch. (It was…pretty easy, to say the least, even/especially if you had a car.)  
>  **

“Which is why you’re staying up late,” the Sheriff said, sounding more amused than anything else. “But you’re still not staying up all night.”

Stiles whined but didn’t put up too much of a fight, instead gathering up the cups and bowls together.

“You know where you’re staying, Steve?” the Sheriff asked.

“I figure I’ll go stay in one of the motels across town,” Steve said, standing up and holding out his hand to the man. “Thank you so much for letting me spend the evening here. It really meant a lot.”

The Sheriff smiled as he shook Steve’s hand. “You going to be in town for a while?”

> **The Sheriff won’t show it, but he likes having guests over. He says it’s to keep Stiles out of trouble, but really it’s about keeping Stiles company and keeping the house from being too empty.  
>  **

“I honestly don’t know,” Steve said with a shrug. At the Sheriff’s surprised look, he said, “I’ve just been driving wherever I felt the need to go from New York onwards. I hit the west coast a little faster than I expected. I have to be in Los Angeles in about three weeks, but other than that, I don’t really have anything planned out.”

“Which means you might be staying here for a few weeks, right?” Stiles said, looking hopeful.

“Uh…” Steve rattled his brain. “I…might stay here for a week or so,” he hedged.

“Then you can stay here with us!” Stiles declared.

> **Stiles likes having people over, too.  
>  **

“He can stay where he wants,” Mr. Stilinski said, though he looked oddly proud of Stiles for making his offer. He caught Steve’s expression and added, “I’m not just making this offer to be polite. We have a guest room, and it’s nothing fancy, but it’s free and probably more comfortable than any of the motels around town.

Steve thought of all the places he’d been staying, when he wasn’t just camping out under the stars. All the cheap motels and fancy hotels and bed after bed after bed that didn’t feel like home.

> **Especially since they have cheap, soft beds that are terrible for your back. A lot of us have been trained by cartoons to associate softness with luxury, but cheap beds are lot more likely to be too soft than too firm (unless they’re ‘mass bought’, industrial settings like schools, prisons, on-call rooms, etc. - _then_ they’re likely to be too firm) A bed that’s too soft is worse for your back than a bed that’s too firm (assuming the firmness is still a little softer than the ground).  
>  **

“Thank you,” Steve said, shy but earnest.

“You won’t be thanking me when this one wakes you up in the morning crashing around the bathroom,” the Sheriff said sardonically, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at his indignant son. “But until then, you’re welcome.”

> **He slept in a warzone, Sheriff, it’ll take a bit more than Stiles to wake him up if he’s not already restless.  
>  **

Steve laughed, unforced and making his cheeks ache as he followed the boy up the stairs.

This wasn’t his home, but it was _a_ home, and that made all the difference.


	3. (Steve) Waking Up the Next Morning

A lot more of a difference than Steve expected, in fact.

Steve woke up only once in the middle of the night, jerking awake with little more than a harsh breath and a half-sob, quiet in the pre-dawn chill. He played around with his phone some, grateful that he didn’t wake up either of the Stilinskis, and against all his expectations…

He actually fell back asleep just as the sun started to peek over the horizon.

> **There’s a reason why he’s normally running by now. Believe it or not, that’s actually a really important PTSD coping mechanism. Doing a simple, physical, and repetitive task is a great way to come down from nightmares, panic attacks, anxiety attacks, flashbacks, and other spikes of negative emotions and fear responses.  
> **   
>    
> 

He fell asleep, and he didn’t wake again until almost noon. He actually stared at the time on the phone, then checked his watch, unable to believe the time.

Shaking his head in bewilderment, he got dressed, brushed his teeth, and made his way downstairs. Stiles was nowhere to be seen, but the Sheriff was sitting on the sofa, a small stack of magazines by his side.

Time Magazine was still at least somewhat familiar after seventy years, and it was disturbing and relieving in equal measures.

> **Time Magazine has been around since 1923, so the red border is probably very familiar to Steve. My fave magazine! ♥ Well, actually, while the magazine has been around since 1923, their signature red border wasn't introduced until 1927:  
> **   
>    
>    
>  ~~**Is it just me or does he look a bit like Col. Phillips?**~~

****

“Morning,” the Sheriff said with an easy smile. “Sleep well?”

“Yeah,” Steve said, not hiding his surprise. “Best sleep I’ve had in…a while.”

> **The Sheriff knows a thing or two about nightmares and trauma. And very little of it is from his time in the Army, or his personal experiences at all.[Shameless self-plug time!](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4467227)**

The Sheriff seemed proud of that. “Good to hear. You got any plans for today?”

“Not really,” Steve sad shyly. “I…didn’t really have any plans at all, beyond ‘find my…Bucky’s last living relative’.”

The Sheriff raised an eyebrow at the slip-up, but thankfully didn’t comment. “Stiles and I did some grocery shopping while you were still asleep,” he said, setting aside the magazine and standing up. “I’ll see what I can whip up for you.”

> **This slip-up is why the Sheriff is so quick to ‘adopt’ Steve into the family. He recognized that Bucky wasn’t just a friend to Steve, but family, and that Steve genuinely considered Stiles as his own family as much as Bucky would’ve done had it been him in this situation. That, and because he isn’t close to his extended family and Claudia’s is all dead, Stiles doesn’t really have much in the way of family, and the Sheriff would like for him to have someone.  
>  **

“Thank you,” Steve said earnestly, following the Sheriff into the kitchen. He stopped in the doorway and looked around curiously as the Sheriff opened up some cabinets to peek inside and see what he had.

“Sandwiches sound good?”

Steve nodded, politely offering assistance and taking a seat at the table when the Sheriff declined. While the Sheriff put several sandwiches together, Steve stared at the appliances on the kitchen counter curiously, trying to figure out what they were for.

> **It hasn’t come up too much yet, but Stiles and Steve start exchanging recipes and going on cooking adventures together (as in, they’ll both try a new recipe or something and compare results). It got lost to the wayside in Chapter 4, when I was originally planning to introduce it, so I’ll find a way to bring it up more in Chapter 5. I’m not a big fan of Pack Mom Stiles (well, the tropey fanon post-Season 2 version anyway; I love the Aggressive Pack Mom Stiles of Seasons 4 and 5, though). BUT, I do like the idea of Stiles being a good cook.  
>  **

The Sheriff must’ve seen his confusion, because he followed Steve’s line of sight and said, “That’s a grill.”

“That’s a grill?” Steve asked incredulously.

“A George Foreman grill,” the Sheriff said. “Not as good as the full one outdoors, but when you want grilled food and don’t want the hassle of dealing with the real deal…”

> **Grilling as we know it today is not what Steve would’ve known growing up. The closest things would’ve been camp-stoves or barbequing (largely a Southern thing in his day). The closest things to domestic grills in existence would’ve been ‘picnic grills’, and grilling was still meant for cook-outs and all-day food events. Things like kettle-grills, gas-fueled grills, and other forms of grills meant for the backyard didn’t become popular until backyards became popular with the post-WWII housing boom - before that, only the wealthy or the rural had yards, let alone outdoor grills to keep in their backyard. George Foreman and other indoor grills have only been around for about two decades or to.  
> **   
> 

Steve nodded, and then said, “What’s the thing next to it?”

“It’s called a magic bullet, but basically it’s small and really efficient blender,” the Sheriff said. “For making a smoothie or milkshake or whatever.”

> **Blenders have been around since Steve was a kid, but for the most part they were only found in bars (for making cocktails) and institutions like hospitals that needed smooth or liquefied food for patients. (Allegedly, though, a blender was at some point involved the discovery of the polio vaccine). Blenders grew right along with most other kitchen appliances during - you guessed it - the WWII housing boom.  
> **   
> 

“Huh,” Steve said, cocking his head to the side as he studied it. “And next to that…?”

It was a surprisingly enjoyable meal, Steve asking about the different kitchen appliances, which led to a nice half hour spent talking about changes in food in general. The Sheriff was amusingly familiar with health food trends entirely because Stiles kept trying to force them on him, and Steve had plenty of stories about the weird things Tony ate to compare notes. Steve was honestly surprised to find himself smiling through the Sheriff’s rants about all the godawful things Stiles had him trying, but still made a mental note to approach ‘superfoods’ with extreme caution.

> **This is why housing is considered such an integral industry to a national economy, especially the American economy - it’s not the houses, it’s the stuff inside them. Less or smaller houses = less stuff bought to fill those houses.**

But he would probably still approach them, mostly down to Tony and Natasha. They could be…quite determined, when they wanted to be.

> **Steve getting into new food and cuisine is largely their fault.  
>  **

Before he even realized it, the Sheriff was checking his watch and saying, “I have to go to a town council meeting soon - why don’t you text Stiles, spend some time with him? Hopefully, you can keep him out of trouble.”

> **Oh, Sheriff, you poor, poor soul…  
>  **

Despite the fact the family relation was through Claudia, Steve couldn’t help but smile at the familiar gruffness in the Sheriff’s voice.

“I used to be the one getting Bucky into trouble,” Steve admitted, pulling out his phone. “But I’ll do my best.”

> **Steve is very lucky I decided to cut out the scene with the Holocaust denier, next chapter.**


	4. (Steve) Froyo Conversations

Steve pulled up to some kind of ice-cream place - or rather, a frozen-yogurt place. Steve still wasn’t sure what the difference was.

> **What IS the difference? I still don’t get it, and I used to live with someone who worked for a froyo chain.**

Stiles stood in front of it, checking his phone and biting his lip as he looked around. He had another boy with him, a Hispanic-looking teenager with shaggy hair and an uneven jaw line, who seemed to be playing a game on his phone.

> **In case it’s not obvious, I think Teen Wolf white-washed Scott like a picket fence and I’m not happy about it. At all. Celebrating diversity is going to be a small but recurring theme in this entire series.**

“Steve!” Stiles greeted as soon as Steve pulled off his helmet. Steve smiled at him while locking the helmet to his bike, adjusting his now-much-lighter bag as he walked up to the boys.

Stiles’ friend squinted at him for a moment in confusion, before his eyes widened and his jaw dropped. “Aren’t you-”

“Yes,” Stiles said immediately, snickering. “Steve, this is my best friend, Scott. Scott, this is Steve, the family friend I was telling you about.”

“Du-u-ude!” Scott said, drawing out the vowel and seeming to be talking to Stiles even as he held his hand out to Steve. “Captain America is your family friend?”

> **To non-Californians who are confused: yes, people say ‘dude’ as much as the characters in the show. In SoCal, it can get even more prevalent.**

Steve smiled politely as he glanced between their faces, between Scott’s awe and Stiles’ amusement.

“My grandma’s older brother was Bucky Barnes, remember?” Stiles said as Steve shook Scott’s hand.

“The Barnes family practically adopted me after my own died,” Steve explained. Stiles opened the door and herded them inside. “So I went looking for them when I got the chance, and I found Stiles.”

“Dude,” Scott repeated, pausing just inside the doorway. “You know the Black Widow, right?”

> **I wanted to avoid a lot of direct parallels and relationships, because they seem so contrived. So while I do think there are a tremendous amount of parallels between Scott and Steve, I also made Scott a Black Widow fanboy instead of a Captain America fanboy (though let’s face it, Steve’s a Black Widow fanboy, too). This also foreshadows what I think are a lot of parallels between Allison and Natasha.**

Steve smiled again, this time a little more genuine - and a little amused. The kid had hearts in his eyes. “Yup.”

“I don’t think he can get you her autograph, though,” Stiles said, and Steve nodded in apologetic agreement as he glanced around the tables. There were half a dozen other people in here - one family, a small group of college kids, and a pair of kids who might’ve been friends and might’ve been pre-teens on a date, it was hard to tell.

> **I like to imagine this is Liam and Mason.**

“But still! She’s awesome!” Scott said with a big grin, bounding towards the other end of the shop where a giant bin of disposable…Bowls? Cups?…sat waiting by several machines with handles and flavors on them. The other wall was full of bins of candy, nuts, and other various elaborate ice cream toppings - and there were so many.

> **Self-serve ice-cream/froyo is probably very strange to Steve (actually, I suspect most “self-serve” things are). While the number of toppings available might not be so strange, the variety, as well as the fact there are so many available in same place (and isn't a “fancy” or high-end joint) might be.**

They got their frozen yogurts, both boys unsurprisingly opting for less of the actual ice cream - or ‘froyo’ as they called it - in favor of filling up their cups with as many candy toppings as possible. They meticulously put pieces in their bowls and kept weighing them, trying to get as much candy as possible with the few scrunched up bills and spare change they pulled out of their pockets. Steve watched them with fondness as he tried the different flavors of the frozen yogurt. They reminded him of himself and Bucky, pooling their spare change - back when spare change actually had buying power - to buy themselves a treat or some drinks at the end of the work week.

> **From the looks of the brief flashback scene in the movies and the different backgrounds implied with it, it’s unlikely Steve and Bucky were really as impoverished as fandom believed before Captain America 2 came out. Especially if Steve was an illustrator of some kind, his canon job from the comic books and heavily implied in the first Captain America movie - while he wouldn’t have been wealthy or even middle-class, comic books were kicking up during this time, and it would’ve been almost a white-collar job.**

Steve ended up getting some caramel flavored thing with mixed berries on top. And, okay, maybe a few pieces of candy on the side.

> **Because that kid from Brooklyn is still inside Steve, and still has a bit of a sweet tooth.**

The lone cashier working in the front of the store didn’t pay much attention to Steve, instead monitoring the boys while Steve paid for his own concoction. As they approached their table, Steve smiled apologetically at the boys as he said, "Mind if I take this seat?". He didn't actually wait for an answer as he sat in the chair that put his back to the rest of the ice cream parlor...frozen yogurt parlor?

> **Are froyo joints called parlors? _I_ don’t even know the answer to this, so no wonder Steve doesn’t know, either. Either way, Steve's idea of an ice-cream _parlor_ (as in a place where you actually sit down to eat it, instead of getting it in a cone that you can eat on the go) would be something like this:  
> **   
> 

"Sure!" Stiles said, the boys flopping into their own chairs.

Scott nodded, but asked, "Why that one?"

Before Steve could answer, Stiles did, rolling his eyes as he said, "Because he doesn't want anyone to see him, duh." At Scott's owlish blinking, he added, "Would you want to risk being inundated by paparazzi while you're just trying to eat some froyo?"

> **While Steve is very paranoid, he’s not likely to be recognized much. Our brains are hardwired to look for a few faces at a time - so people we know/are familiar with. Unless you are actively paying attention to faces to see if it’s a face you know, you won’t recognize people in passing unless you really know them. So while really big Captain America fans who look at his face a lot might recognize Steve out of uniform and out of context, most people wouldn’t.**

Scott snorted, but also nodded, taking a spoonful of his creation that was more candy than cream.

> **This is why Steve could walk through an entire museum exhibit dedicated to him and his friends with pictures of himself everywhere, and have only one person, one _kid_ , recognize him even though he wasn’t actively disguising himself. People weren’t looking for him, so they didn’t see him.  
> **   
> 

Stiles smiled, and turned to Steve. "So, what are you up to, today?"

Steve took a bite of his frozen treat - it was good, though he still didn't get why Tony was obsessed with it. "I don't really have any plans. Your dad suggested I come out here to keep you out of trouble, but it doesn't look like you're going to get into any. You don't even have anything to get into trouble with."

> **In this, Stiles is a little more related to Steve than to Bucky. Steve was always the one getting into trouble with Bucky pulling him out, and Scott is the one who used to pull Stiles out of trouble when Stiles did something stupid.**

Scott snorted. "Dude, Stiles can be buck naked and still get into trouble."

The other boy looked down thoughtfully at his frozen yogurt. "Actually, I can think of a few situations where being naked is what gets me into trouble in the first place-"

"That wasn't a suggestion!" Scott yelped.

"I'm just saying," Stiles said, clearly goading Scott, pausing only to wink at Steve. "We could spice up the homecoming game with a bit of streaking-"

"No!" Scott said, looking mortified at the thought.

"C'mon-"

"Stiles, we'd get arrested!" Scott pointed out. "How awkward would it be if your dad had to arrest you for public nudity?"

> **I am sorely tempted to write a deleted scene about this, just for the sheer hilarity of the Sheriff having to arrest Stiles for streaking. Except now I’m thinking of Stiles going streaking specifically to cheer up Lydia after her three-day run throughout the woods, and goddamnit plotbunnies, I’m literally an overtime student right now, I do not need this shit. -_-**

Stiles' entire face twitched at that mental picture, and Steve snorted into his caramel-slathered berries.

"That would be kind of awkward," Steve agreed.

"...we'd have to wait until Dad wasn't on duty," Stiles said, starting to speculate.

"Dude, the deputies will call him if they arrest you," Scott pointed out.

> **Bucky and Scott both have a lot of practice in talking down their favorite trouble-makers.**

Steve watched, unobtrusive and entertained, as Stiles came up with increasingly elaborate plans to run wild and naked through the school, while Scott kept poking holes in those plans.

Unobtrusive, entertained, and a little heartbroken. If he thought just the pictures of them on Facebook reminded him of himself and Bucky, that was nothing compared to watching these two bicker and connive in person. Stiles had definitely inherited the Barnes family penchant for elaborate schemes.

> **Which is not to say Bucky and Scott don’t get into a fair amount of trouble on their own. :P They come up with ideas, while Stiles and Steve tend to figure out how to actually do them, and also tend to get into a fair bit of trouble on their own.**

"Anyway," Scott eventually said, giving up on trying to talk sense into Stiles. "We were just gonna spend the afternoon doing lacrosse training."

Stiles coughed pointedly, and Scott rolled his eyes. "We're gonna go check on Stiles' obsession, then go train."

"Roscoe isn't an obsession!" Stiles immediately protested.

"...the fact that you named it kind of makes it an obsession by default," Scott said.

"Who's Roscoe?" Steve asked.

Stiles grinned, and Scott groaned.

> **I want it known for the record I’d made this plan/subplot with Roscoe before Season 5 started airing. I kind of expected that I would be diverging so much from canon by that point that I would basically be ignoring Seasons 5A and 5B by the time I got there. But honestly, they fall in line with my world and plans so well, I’m adapting my story to the show and making surprisingly few changes to do it. >:)**

Twenty minutes later, he stood waiting outside the only car dealership in town. He leaned against his motorbike, parked in the unmarked pavement outside the fence, as the two teenagers pedaled in on their bicycles towards him. The actual dealer who'd been eyeing Steve rolled his eyes when he saw the boys.

A portly man whose hair might've been blonde a few decades ago, he strode out of the gateway and yelled towards the boys, "Your damn jeep is fine!", just as they pulled up.

"I told him that," Scott said, panting and leaning over his handlebars.

"I know, I know," Stiles said, flailing off his bike while trying to kick down the kickstand at the same time. Stiles gesticulated at Steve and said, "I just want to show him my future car. He's a family friend."

The man narrowed his eyes at Stiles, then threw his hands up in exasperation as he turned and went back towards the office. On the way, though, Steve caught a glimpse of his face, and as soon as he turned away from the boys, the man was not nearly as irritated as he was acting.

> **Mr. Keller is not actually much of an old grump, but this town needs a resident old grump and somehow that task has fallen to him. Probably because most of the teens in the town get their first cars from him, so he’s often the gateway for teenagers to expand the breadth and depth of their adolescent idiocy. With a position like that, who else could be the old town grump? :P**

Scott rolled his eyes as he also slipped off his bike, rolling it over and parking it neatly by Steve's. Then he glared at Stiles until the other boy sighed in long-suffering and did the same.

Stiles all but ran through the gateway as Scott and Steve followed at a more sedate pace, both walking quietly as Stiles wove them through all the cars. Used and New were mixed together, the lot instead organized by type of car - SUV, minivan, sedan - and then further sorted by color. All the way in the back were a variety of jeeps, trucks, and all-terrain vehicles.

In the absolute back corner, Stiles stopped by a baby-blue jeep. It was most definitely used, but kept in good condition.

> **And a very noticeable shade of blue. Like, impossible to miss. The Sheriff was happy about that, and Stiles regretted it once he started needed to sneak around. But like hell is he going to besmirch his mother’s favorite color. ~~(The Stockholm Syndrome runs too deep for that.)~~**

"Mr. Keller's holding it off the market until the end of the year, and my dad already promised to cover half. I just have to save up enough for the other half by then and it's mine. I've already got about a third of what I need, too!"

He grinned, actually patting the jeep like a beloved steed.

The jeep didn't have a big price tag sticker on it like most of the other cars, but the price was still listed on the paperwork in the window, which Steve leaned in to look at.

"Why this jeep?" he asked, peering at Stiles over the hood. "It looks like you could get plenty of other cars for a better price."

Scott leaned against the front bumper as Stiles looked towards the driver's seat, his small smile at odds with the sudden sadness in his eyes.

"This was my mom's car," he murmured.

Oh.

Steve took a step back, taking in the jeep and trying to figure out what Bucky's niece would've seen in it. "This was Claudia's?"

> **After I posted this, I regretted “Bucky’s niece”. I really should’ve gone with “Rebecca’s daughter”. Ah, well, you live and you learn, right?**

Stiles nodded. "Me and Dad had to sell it a while back. But that was years ago. Now, Mr. Keller agreed to hold onto it for as long as he can, even if someone else gives him a better price." Then he snorted, amused and nostalgic in equal measures. "Not that many have, people don't appreciate the classics."

"You must've loved this car," Steve said.

Scott snorted, but Stiles ignored him. "Yup! This was the car that dropped me off to my first day of preschool, and then my first day of elementary school. This was the car wherein I learned how to sing to the radio, where I learned how to tie my shoes, where I first learned how to read by looking at the street signs-"

"-where he once peed his pants after too many slushies," Scott continued, smirking. Stiles turned to glare at Scott while Steve snorted. Scott grinned when he caught sight of Stiles' irritation.

> **This car is almost as familiar to Scott as it is to Stiles. It’s a hell of a lot more familiar to Scott than any vehicle of his father’s ever was.**

"Anyway," Stiles said, drawing out the world syllable by syllable as he turned back to Steve. "I practically grew up in this car. Dad was originally gonna hold onto it for me, but uh - Mom's medical bills were...a lot. So selling the car covered most of them, but no one else wanted the jeep for years. Since Mr. Keller knew my mom - she was one of his first customers when he opened this place - he took it off the market when I got my learner's permit. I'll get my license on my sixteenth birthday and then come here and get my jeep!"

"That's nice of him," Steve said. "When's your birthday?"

"End of November," Stiles said, patting the jeep goodbye and turning back towards the gate. Scott walked alongside Stiles, this time, as Steve followed both the boys. "Just a bit after Thanksgiving."

"It'll always be easy to find in a parking lot," Scott mused, with a sidelong smile at Stiles. That was true - even with the jeep all the way in the back, it's color definitely made it stick out in the car lot. Why everyone's cars were only a few colors, these days, Steve just did not understand.

> **The earliest cars in America - Model T’s - were black because that was the most economical way to paint a car. Once the technology came through to cheaply paint cars bright colors, Americans took it and ran, which is why Steve grew up surrounded by bright, colorful cars.  
> **   
>    
>    
>  **During the 70’s, Americans started to take a more ecological and economical perspective on cars (especially due to the gas crisis). On top of that, it was the Bicentennial (1976, the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of the Independence), so when those two combined, the top three popular car colors became red, white, and blue. The last few decades brought along white, black, and gray as part of the growth of gadgetry and personal technologies that were usually chrome, black, and white - in other words, people trying to look ‘futuristic’. The end result being that red, white, blue, black, and silver are the most popular and common car colors today.**

****

"My car is going to be the best car in the parking lot," Stiles sniffed, turning to walk backwards for a bit. "Even better than Jackson's."

"And Jackson is...?" Steve asked.

"Getting a Porche on his sixteenth birthday," Stiles grumbled.

Steve's eyebrows rose.

"His family's got a lot of money," Stiles said, bumping into a car and weaving around it. "Because his dad is a prick."

> **Okay, while I’m here: while they have the same initials, a defense attorney and a district attorney are NOT the same thing. A ‘DA’ most commonly refers to a _district_ attorney, not a defense attorney (which is generally just shortened to ‘attorney). Defense attorneys are typically associated with getting the most money, and defending criminals. A district attorney’s job is literally the exact opposite - their job is to represent the state and _prosecute_ criminals. They are the chief prosecutor of the county.**

Steve blinked, then looked at Scott.

> **Cops and DA’s actually usually get along (since both are trying to get criminals off the streets and into jails), but when they don’t, they _really_ don’t, since that typically only happens for political reasons. That said, based on their interaction with each other when Jackson returned from getting kidnapped, and at the crime scene at the rave, it looks like Sheriff Stilinski and Davis Whittemore actually get along with each other fine. It’s just their sons who hate each other.**

"Jackson's dad is the District Attorney, and Stiles' dad is the Sheriff," Scott explained. "So obviously, they have to hate each other on principle. Jackson just makes it easy because he's a giant douchebag."

> **As a side note, both the Sheriff’s office and the District Attorney’s office are elected positions in California (and most states in America). This is probably why the kidnapping was reduced to a restraining order - neither of them wanted that mess in the local media.**

"Ah," Steve said with a sage nod, twisting a little to get between two SUVs. "I see."

"Can you see this?" Scott said, holding out his phone with what looked like a map on it. "This is where we are now, and this is where the school is."

Steve nodded, committing the directions to memory. Outside the gate, he straddled his bike, then looked over to Stiles.

"By the way..."

"Yeah?" Stiles asked.

"...why 'Roscoe'?"

> **Do we have a canonical explanation for the name, yet? Right now, I actually headcanon that Claudia was the one who named it Roscoe, but _she_ never explained where it came from, which is why it probably also came from her own favorite male model or porn star.**

Stiles snickered as he said, "Um, an actor I like."

Scott groaned. "You don't wanna know, Steve, believe me."

"See, that just makes me want to know even more," Steve said, face smoothing out a bit.

"Really, just an actor I like, the jeep needed a name and that was the first thing that popped into my head," Stiles babbled.

"And for some reason," Scott droned. "He isn't bothered that when he needed a name for his car, the first thing he thought of is his favorite porn star."

"Scott!" Stiles yelped, and Steve chuckled at Stiles' indignation. "What if he tells my dad?"

"I think your dad knows you watch porn by now," Scott said.

> **Are there any parents out there who honestly believe their kids are NOT watching porn? Do none of them remember being teenagers?**

"No! He does not! And I want to keep it that way!" Stiles said. Then he looked at Steve, and pointed at Scott. "Lies, all lies, all of them."

"Uh-huh," Steve said. "Don't worry, dirty pictures are nothing new for me." At the boys' disconcerted looks, he added, "I was a city-boy, then I was in the army. Kind of hard to miss. Hell, I've drawn a few pin-ups, myself."

> **For much of the early 20th century, a very popular kind of porn was something called a bluesie, also known as a Tijuana bible. They were little porn comics, which got especially popular in the Great Depression. How much you wanna bet Steve drew a few of those himself?  
> **   
>    
>    
>  **That is the _only_ SFW image that came up with I Googled "Tijuana bibles"! That was just the cover of one. Most of them would've looked something like [this](http://art.cafimg.com/images/Category_47886/subcat_120933/Tijuana%20Bible.jpg) (linked because it's NSFW)...**  
>    
>  **...or like this Mickey and Minnie Mouse bluesie:[1](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cu6twQ1XYAAklER.jpg), [2](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-79IWdckkRXA/TzqYddNLzbI/AAAAAAAADeE/FEkmb02ss_A/s1600/tij03b.jpg), [3](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7Hz09aeebuo/TzqYdzlWEKI/AAAAAAAADeM/ZtuUHVlAfI4/s1600/tij04.jpg). That's right, Captain America went to war in the era with Mickey Mouse porn. People have always been perverted little shits, we're just more obvious about it today than eras prior.**  
>    
>  **(And yes, this means there were almost definitely Captain America bluesies floating around at the time, too.)**

"As long as you don't tell my dad," Stiles grumbled, still sending betrayed looks at his best friend. Scott wasn't even trying to hide his amusement at Stiles' expense. "Seriously, he'll take away my computer and life as I know it will end if he found out."

Teenagers hadn't changed much since Steve's day, let alone the Sheriff's - and the Sheriff was a sharp man to boot. He probably already suspected, if not knew, what his son was up to.

> **Poll Time: what kind of porn is the Sheriff into now, or was he into when he was Stiles’ age? C’mon, there has to be a few interesting headcanons out there…**

But there was no fun in telling Stiles that, so instead he promised his silence on the matter, then pulled on his helmet as the boys pedaled away.

As Steve drove to the field where he was going to meet them, he wondered if he should name his bike.

No one would be surprised if he named it Margaret the Motorcycle, and Peggy would likely even be amused at the dubious honor.

Honestly, though, in this day and age - maybe he could get away with Bucky the Bike. It had a much nicer ring to it, and was just a little bit closer to the truth.

> **Save a bike, ride a Bucky.**


	5. (Steve) Steve and History

"These things have been running like crazy since the Battle of New York," Stiles said the next day. Steve cringed good-naturedly at the tune of his old theme song playing from the TV. It was a re-colored film of one of his old shows. It segued into a black-and-white clip of him and the Howling Commandos rolling into a town on top of a stolen Nazi truck, Steve and Dum Dum hanging off the sides. There was no sound of the actual event filmed, though, and with good reason.

> **Good god, could you imagine how obnoxious WWII buffs would be in our real world if a WWII hero came back from the dead to fight off aliens?  
> **   
>  **Incidentally, here's a mock-up made by[@MediAvengers](https://mediavengers.tumblr.com/post/56385457396/history-channel-specials-avengers-related-history):  
> **   
> 

****

"Bucky woulda been pissed if he realized how cheerful he looked," Steve said, pointing to where Bucky had been driving the truck. The film clip switched over to some posed pictures of Steve and his team. He looked over at the boys, who were sprawled against opposite arms of the couch. "He was yelling at me and Dum Dum to stop being hooligans and get back in the truck with the others. Threatened to keep driving and leave us behind if we fell off."

> **Bucky was basically the Howling Commando’s Derek, just with less facial hair and more swearing. Or maybe a combination of Derek and Stiles, now that I think about it…  
>  **

Stiles and Scott both laughed, nearly kicking their popcorn bowls off each other's stomachs. Steve leaned back into the arm chair he'd appropriated, since the Sheriff was off at work.

"Did you?" Scott asked eagerly. "Fall off?"

"Not this time," Steve said.

Stiles grinned, while Scott's eyes went wide. "Does this mean there were other times?"

> **Every time Steve fell off a vehicle, the Howling Commandos would speed up and make Steve chase them, because watching Steve run at super-human speeds never stopped getting old. Especially for Bucky, who was usually the one making Steve chase them - he knew what limitations Steve had to deal with for most of their lives, and he absolutely does his best to make sure Steve gets to use his new abilities as much as possible.  
>  **

"Oh, plenty," Steve said, as the credits ended and the documentary began. He sighed at the picture of him lined up with all the other Project Rebirth recruits. Steve was the shortest and skinniest in a line of soldiers whose physiques looked closer to what Steve had now. "I definitely don't miss boot camp."

> **WWII APFTs (Army Physical Fitness Tests) are hell on the knees. OW.  
>  **

Scott winced at the project footage of the recruits going through an obstacle course, the narrator describing Erskine's criteria. "I can't imagine doing that with asthma. I would've passed out."

"I _did_ pass out," Steve admitted. "Twice."

It was funny, at first. Steve kept providing commentary on the clips and photos, talking over the historian interviews. He expounded on the funnier parts of being a USO performer, what really happened inside that HYDRA base, and just how excruciating the bureaucratic nightmare of his post-raid hearing was.

> **My wrists start twitching at the thought of how much paperwork Steve’s POW rescue alone must have generated - forget all the Howlies’ antics in general.  
>  **

He smiled fondly when the documentary started digging into their backgrounds. He burned with familiar frustration when they spent so much time on Steve, but he was used to it - he did tend to attract attention like that. They tied him close to Bucky, though Steve wondered how they knew about the times Steve had tagged along with the Barnes family to their synagogue.

> **Here we see the beginnings of my convergence of Jewish!Bucky and Jewish!Stiles fanons. And honestly just me trying to incorporate more multiculturalism in general, because as much as I love them, both franchises have problems with white-washing, racism, and cultural erasure - Teen Wolf less so than MCU, but it’s still there.  
>  **

Scott smiled at that. "I tagged along with Stiles, once, when we were little."

"All the old ladies squeezed his cheeks so hard, he looked like he was blushing by the end," Stiles said, snickering as Scott stuck his tongue out at Stiles.

"And they kept shoving snacks at us," Scott added. "Kept saying we were too skinny."

"They did the same thing to me," Steve consoled.

The documentary segued into Dum Dum's family and history, then Gabe's from there. Steve blinked in surprise when after barely taking long enough to mention that Gabe was the only Howling Commando with a college degree, it shifted to Dernier.

> **Near as I can tell, this is true. Granted, we don’t actually know much about any of the MCU!Howlies in general (and in all honesty, for most of them even adding in comics background doesn’t help much), so saying anything about their backgrounds is never saying much. In the movie, Gabe mentions starting to study German, then switching over to French because the classes had prettier girls. It’s very unlikely that Gabe attended a high school that taught German (after WWI, very few high schools in America would’ve offered German at all, and even fewer would’ve been high schools with black students), and if Gabe had studied German as part of some military training/program, it was extremely unlikely he’d switch languages at all, let alone for reasons related to personal interests (and on top of that, I don’t think such programs even accepted black soldiers at the time - the army was still racially segregated). So, Gabe probably went to college as a civilian.  
> **   
>  **Nothing about any of the other Howlies’ backgrounds say anything about their education, but based on comics, as well as historical context, it’s unlikely any of them had, meaning Gabe was the only one. Additionally, given that he appeared to be their signals guy, Jim Morita would’ve had a lot of specialized technical training, if not some education in his own right…meaning that the two ‘colored’ men on the team were the most educated team-members, which probably would’ve pissed off a LOT of people and would explain why we know so little about their backgrounds. In-universe, a lot of people would’ve done their best to avoid acknowledging white men being less educated than non-white peers, and the best way to do that would be to mention their backgrounds as little as possible.  
>  **

****

"That's it?"

"Huh?" both boys asked.

"They spent five minutes on Dum Dum!" Steve said, bewildered.

Scott frowned, and Stiles grimaced.

"It is the History channel," he said, like that meant something. When Steve looked at him for explanation, Stiles added, "They have a tendency to white-wash things."

> **No, but seriously, this is actually a major problem with the History Channel. They keep narrowing down their focus towards celebrating old white men, so more and more only conservatives and other old white men watch their channel, leading them to narrow down anymore…it’s a vicious cycle that is absolutely _butchering_ history. *history nerd rage*  
>  **

"...white-wash?" Steve asked.

"Uh, down-play racism, contributions of minority historical figures, that sort of thing," Stiles said. Scott pouted a little. "It's...a problem. With history in America in general."

> **The Trail of Tears is actually a pretty good metric for how honest/diverse an American history course will be, which is part of why I brought it up here so much.  
>  **

Steve hummed discordantly, but sat back to watch the documentary with a little more attention.

It didn't get better. A cynical part of him wasn't surprised that an American-produced documentary wouldn't devote equal attention to them all, but he still chafed at how little time they spent on Gabe. It got even worse when Steve heard all the fancy words they used to gloss over Jim's family being-

"They were interned!" Steve snapped at the screen when it cut to the commercial break - far too soon. "That - that was wrongful imprisonment, how could they barely mention..."

> **[This post](http://nyxelestia.tumblr.com/post/85982773975/justatinysootsprite-harlequinnade-what-are) does a pretty good breakdown of what Jim and his family most likely experienced in WWII. In short, his family would’ve been imprisoned at Sunny Poston, Arizona.  
> **   
>    
>    
>  **There, a questionnaire put the men in a position where they would either have to agree to serve in the US Army or face a very high risk of being deported. (While the questionnaire, the deportation, and nearly everything else about the situation has been retroactively deemed unconstitutional, the forcing of men to serve in the military is still considered debatable, namely because the draft meant that men of all races were technically being made to serve in the military with no considering their will/choice).**  
> 

He looked to the boys, to Stiles, who only waved helplessly at the screen and reiterated, "White-washing."

It got even worse from there. While most of Peggy's actual intelligence history was classified, most of her interactions with the team weren't. Even back then, let alone now. She held a powerful legacy to her name, and people across the world studied her intelligence craft and her skills in espionage.

And all this documentary talked about was her doomed relationship with Steve, the tragic wartime romance.

> **This probably sums up my attitude towards media in general (including fanfiction, sometimes). #aromanticproblems  
>  **

"That's Agent Carter to you," Steve grumbled under his breath at the next commercial break.

> **I am absolutely trying to find a way to incorporate the show into this universe. And since Mr. Yukimura’s actor just played a Los Angeles doctor in Agent Carter…  
> **   
>    
>  **(Tom Choi playing a doctor giving Edwin Jarvis some complicated news.)**

****

"Huh?" Scott asked, tilting his attention towards Steve.

"They called everyone else by our last names or by a rank and name," Steve said. "But they kept calling her Peggy. If I'm Captain Rogers, then she's Agent Carter, no two buts about it. She never tolerated anyone's bullshit."

> **The thing about the names was actually kind of a big deal back then, and still is in some circles today. In a time period where it was more typical to address colleagues by surnames, with first names being only for very close friends, the fact that men often addressed women by their first name was a very subtle condescension - women were not colleagues, so they were not addressed by their last names. You’ll see this in Agent Carter - the other SSR agents call the main character ‘Peggy’ or ‘Margaret’, but call each other/everyone else by last name. (In Season 2, when they finally respect her, they call her Carter.)  
>  **

"Not even yours?" Stiles said, eyes eager for a story.

"Especially not mine," Steve said. "The one time I got mad and made a nasty comment to her, she picked up a loaded gun and pulled the trigger four times, right at me. Only reason I didn't get a bullet wound was because Howard had just given me the shield for the first time."

> **Despite what a lot of people think, I really don’t believe that Peggy shot at Steve because she was jealous, but rather because of the comment Steve made about her ‘fonduing’ with Howard. Steve had set himself apart from most men by respecting her, so immediately descending into shaming her based on sexual activity when he was upset with her made Steve turn out to be just like every other man she encountered. Steve learned, but there was a reason why it took so long for him to earn her respect back.  
>  **

"She sounds like a ball-buster," Stiles said. Steve looked over at him, but to his surprise, Stiles had an admiring look on his face, rather than a disparaging one. "Holy shit, Scott, she sounds like Lydia."

Scott choked on his popcorn, laughing. "Oh my god, this explains so much. And you two aren't even related!"

> **Steve and Stiles share a type. Ball-busting women who take no shit, and surly, muscly brunet men who keep snarking at them and saving their lives while grumbling all the way.  
>  **

Steve raised an eyebrow, and Scott said, "You and Stiles have a type."

"Curvy and dangerous and smart," Stiles said proudly. Then he deflated and added, "When they aren't pretending to be dumb because their boyfriend is an insecure bag of dicks who doesn't deserve them."

> **Lydia is like the lovechild of Jane Foster and Pepper Potts. :D  
>  **

At that little tangent, Steve yet-again looked to Scott. "She's dating Jackson," he explained.

> **Less than a week and Steve’s already figured out that it’s easier to just ask Scott to translate Stiles for him than try to untangle it, himself.  
>  **

"The guy getting a Porche?" Both boys nodded, Stiles with the glummest expression Steve had ever seen outside of a war zone.

Steve was going to try and offer some consolation, but then the documentary came back on.

At least now it wasn't going person by person, but focusing on the team as a whole.

The last half hour took a fun turn, again. Steve regaled side-stories and details about the battles, raids, and ridiculous missions they pulled off. As the narrator talked about all their noble battles alongside the French resistance movement, Steve merrily chattered about all the ridiculous ways to smuggle wine past the Germans that the resistance fighters had figured out. The trip to Poland just wasn't complete without explaining how the their plan had nearly been thwarted by cows. And surprisingly, Steve found himself able to reminisce about the last conversation he had with Bucky, their jokes about the zipline and payback for the Cyclone. His eyes stung, but as he told the story to the boys, to Bucky's grand-nephew and the boy Bucky would've taken under his wing as he'd done for Steve so long ago, Steve found no actual desire to cry.

> **There’s a reason why people call therapy ‘the talking cure’. ;)  
>  **

Was this what moving on felt like?

Despite all that, when the documentary finally ended, Steve found himself still smarting about the disparity in attention the team members had gotten.

"Sorry," Stiles said, when Steve mentioned as much. "But yeah, that's a problem everywhere."

"Other history channels?" Steve asked, confused.

"Other history, period," Stiles said, getting that particular kind of wound up and animated that preceded a lot of informative rambling. "It's a big problem in America in general. People constantly try to whitewash history, especially since Texas is a major textbook producer. Like half the country still isn't allowed to teach the Trail of Tears. And no one talks about all the war crimes in Vietnam. And-"

> **Fun fact: in 1971, Vietnam Veterans Against the War launched an investigation into war-crimes committed in Vietnam in an effort to end the war faster. This investigation was called the Winter Soldier Investigation.[No, really.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_Soldier_Investigation) The character/Bucky’s alter-ego in the comics was named in reference to this. They even made a documentary about it!  
>  **  
> 

"What's the Trail of Tears?" Steve asked.

The boys stared at him, Scott's jaw actually dropping.

Steve fidgeted in their shocked gazes, looking between them for answers.

Then Stiles sighed.

"One thing I should add," he said, looking at Steve and Scott, this explanation apparently being for both of them. "Is that this whitewashed history was the kind that was taught everywhere up until recently." Then he looked at Steve. "The Trail of Tears happened in the 1860's, and you don't know about it. That's how bad it is."

Steve stared, confused. "What was it?"

"That time the American government killed around six-thousand innocent people," Stiles explained. "And forcibly relocated another ten-thousand...for profit. Specifically, land."

> **Back in ye olden days of 2011, my mother was forbidden from even mentioning the Trail of Tears to a class of 5th grade students, despite the fact they’d already studied the Holocaust and thus were clearly mature enough to handle the topic. The problem was not any faculty, but the faculty fearing backlash from the parents.**

Steve gripped the armchair's upholstery harder and harder as Stiles explained about Indian relocation. That explanation segued into what he mentioned earlier, the Vietnam war crimes. He talked about all the various events that American history never covered up but never talked about, either. And he talked about how much trouble their middle school American history teacher had gotten into for even mentioning these things to her classroom.

After seventy years, he would have expected people to know better. After the war, after the Holocaust, after the Nazis and HYDRA, he would've expected people to know better. He hadn't sacrificed everyone and everything he loved just so people could continue their ignorance and repeat all the worst parts of their history.

> **Another side note: while Steve was probably very familiar with prison labor camps, there is a very real chance he didn’t know about - or knew very little about - the ‘civilian’ concentration camps (the Holocaust is usually in actual reference to). While there were rumors about concentration camps, most people actually didn’t believe them at first because they were so heinous, they were deemed impossible - too atrocious for anyone to _actually_ do - and dismissed as anti-German propaganda. It wasn’t until after the war that the true nature and extent of the camps were verified and believed by the rest of the world - by which point, Steve was in the ice.  
>  **

He couldn't believe he died for this.

> **Now, they were probably among the first things he learned about once he came out of the ice, so it’s not a shock for him to hear about it here (and if he and the Howlies ever got close to the camps before Steve went down in the ice, he may very well have known about them during the war, anyway). But I did bring this up just to emphasize how and why these things might be so shocking to Steve. He was no stranger to war crimes and human atrocity, but that doesn’t mean he won’t also be surprised - and then disappointed - by the fact other people can know about these things _and then keep doing them_.  
>  **


	6. (Steve) Inhaler Feels

Steve was out 'lacrosse training' with the boys again for the second time this week. Where last time had mostly been them teaching Steve how to play the game, this time they were doing actual training for the sport.

> **Since we're talking about sports: this is probably how/why Scott and Stiles basically became lacrosse stars overnight, Scott at the beginning of Season 1 and Stiles at the end of Season 2. Strength and speed alone can't make a good athlete - it also takes strategy, agility, and knowing how to use your body to your advantage.  
> **   
>    
>    
>  **Stiles really hinged on those during the championship game at the end of Season 2. It makes sense that we wouldn't see it before, since those are really difficult to demonstrate in practice or drill environments, so Finstock kept him on the bench. Meanwhile, if strength and speed were all it took to push Scott from benchwarmer to star player overnight, that meant he must've had really good agility, strategy, and maneuver beforehand - hell, he would've had to be a _master_ of it if the strength/speed boost were really all it took to make him captain material in less than two months. He probably had all that stuff down well beforehand, but he couldn't execute it because of the asthma.**

It had actually been kinda fun, using the lacrosse stick - which they called a 'crosse' - to lob balls at the boys. Stiles was a terrible goalie, but still cheerfully went along with the exercise - to make Scott feel better, according to him.

> **This, incidentally, is also why in Frost Bite (and later in Talking Cure) I often imply that Scott was learning parkour, martial arts, and gymnastics moves from well before and then throughout the events of Teen Wolf. Most body builder and track runners - people who already have a lot of speed and strength - can’t do acrobatics, and most acrobats (gymnasts, free runners, and acrobatic performers) aren’t actually super-strong or fast. The only reason why Scott would suddenly start doing backflips in the middle of lacrosse practice back in the first episode is if he already knew how from beforehand - meaning, again, he’d been doing them _before_ he got super strength (and probably did these a lot, because it’ll take longer for the asthma to start interfering with his activity than more conventional sports practices).  
> **   
>    
>    
>  **This is also probably why, in canon, Scott often wins fights while Derek regularly gets his ass handed to him, even when Scott was a beta and Derek was an alpha. Derek may be stronger, but he has no idea how to use that strength. Scott wasn’t as strong, but he actually had a good idea of what to do.**

"He'll never be a better goalie than Danny," Stiles confided when Scott had been jogging his lap around the field. "But it's good for reflexes! Even non-goalie players need to be able to catch the ball."

> **Both boys, in their own way, also demonstrate a lot of strategy. Stiles is very good at planning things, while Scott seems to have a very strong grasp of game theory. Stiles' strategic skills shine in "Man vs Nature" conflicts (meaning planning on tricky environmental factors), while Scott's strategic skills shine in "Man vs Man" conflicts (meaning planning on the basis of what other people are going to do). I actually headcanon that this is why Stiles' chessboard was in his room, not the living room - he mostly plays against Scott, not his dad (who is a very smart man and fantastic detective, but that doesn't necessarily translate into planning skills - the Sheriff, thus, has been more about picking apart other people's strategies rather than making and executing his own). /tangent**

Now, Steve stood in the middle of the field, using the stick to throw the balls at the boys. He was improving his aim, and the boys were improving their reflexes. Enough that Steve even held back just a little bit less as he went. He smiled at how the boys jostled each other out of the way to catch as many of the balls as they could. At their behest, he started throwing a little farther, and at different angles and directions, giving them more and more of a challenge.

Surprisingly, Scott kept up.

> **I’m really not kidding about how difficult asthma makes sports - not because of the lung problem itself, but because of the ripple effects it has on the body. It not only destroys your stamina, but also makes building muscle nearly impossible because you can't get enough oxygen to them. My legs literally start to freeze up if I run too much because my muscles are just not getting oxygen, because my lungs are about as good as pre-S1 Scott's lungs and unfortunately, I have not been bitten by a werewolf yet so I’m stuck with them as they are.**

Granted, his breathing hadn't been too great thus far. But not being able to breathe had never stopped Steve before, and he couldn't chide Scott for not letting it stop him, now.

If he were being honest, Steve had actually forgotten that Scott even had asthma…

…right until the boy started wheezing.

> **In retrospect, I think I missed a golden opportunity here. I focused so much on Steve remember this as a dual situation - him and Bucky, projected onto Scott and Stiles - that I didn’t really focus on how Scott’s asthma attack might’ve evoked some serious sense memories for Steve. I wish I’d described Steve remembering his own attacks and almost re-experiencing them even as he prepared to help Scott. Ah, well, you live, you learn. :)**

It wasn't all that noticeable, at first. Scott was still running and jumping, trying to snatch balls out of the air. When Scott happened to come close, Steve heard the familiar hitch in his breathing that used to mean an imminent break in his own activities, way back before Project Rebirth.

But Scott wasn't slowing down at all. And since trying to ease up or slow things down for him would've been the height of hipocrisy, Steve didn't try. He just kept a closer eye on Scott, and he knew he wasn't the only one. Stiles started trying to keep a closer eye on him, too, only taking his gaze away when trying to make a catch.

> **Steve is the kind of guy who will let people hang themselves by their own disabilities before helping them, unless they explicitly ask him for it - not because he thinks they deserve it or need to learn, but because he knows how much someone trying to help always pissed him off. Before Rebirth, he’d rather struggle than let someone else do things for him. I might be projecting, though. Just a little bit. Scott is generally just a helpful human being and tries to help everyone with everything - often backfiring, because while he may also be familiar with that kind of frustration, it won’t be at the forefront of his mind if offering help to someone with a disability, like he once had.**

Yet somehow, it still caught Steve by surprise when a few minutes later, Scott fell to his knees, breath whistling with the effort it took to get air in and out of his lungs.

Steve dropped his crosse as he ran to Scott's side, heart breaking at the familiar combination of panicked frustration and exasperation in Scott's eyes. He'd seen that look in the mirror for most of his life.

"Hey, hey," he said, crouching down by the boy. It had been years since he last got helped through an asthma attack - three years or seventy, just a few days before he met Dr. Erskine and Bucky shipped out to Europe. But Steve still remembered how it went.

> **Most old-timey asthma treatments would run along the same lines of how we treat congestion today - namely calming down and slowing ones breath, steam, etc. The most portable neubulizers back then looked a lot like this (and were of limited efficacy):  
> **   
> 

Or at least, he thought he did.

Because just as he was about to place his hands on Scott's chest, sternum and diaphragm like Bucky used to do, Stiles came running from the direction of their bikes and bags. He was clutching…something in his hand. It was some kind of bent tube, with something like another tube or a cannister inside of the long end of it.

> **It took me a ridiculously long time to describe an inhaler without actually saying what it was or anything related to what it was. I feel like I still missed the mark on it, though.**

As stiles approached, he pulled a cap off the short end as he fell to his knees beside Scott.

He jammed the thing into Scott's hand. Without even looking, Scott wrapped his lips around the short end and pushed down on the cannister. There was a hissing noise as Scott tried to breathe in-

No, not tried - did.

> **I want it known for the record that I had already planned for lots of inhaler feels LONG before Season 5A was chock full of them. (Where did they go in 5B?!)**

Steve stared, stunned, as Stiles tapped a steady rhythm against Scott's chest, and Scott breathed.

He breathed in, impossibly deep against the wheezing of just a moment before. He held his breath for a moment, then breathed out, with only the barest hitch in his breath as the precious air escaped. He took another deep breath, and let that one out, too, with that little hitch still there.

> **This hitching comes from the diaphragm…I don’t think it’s _actually_ clenching, but it sure as hell feels like it. Ugh. I used to have slight stomach aches after bad asthma attacks because of this. :(**

Then Stiles said, "C'mon, Scott, just one more." Scott pressed down on the cannister again. There was another hiss, and another deep breath, and another, this time without even the hitch. Two more deep breaths later, Scott pulled the tube away from his mouth.

Less than three minutes from the start of his asthma attack, and it was just…gone.

> **It’s not actually gone this fast, but the outward, visible symptoms will be mitigated. Scott’s throat and lungs are still burning from the oxygen deprivation, and will be for another 5-10 minutes.**

Steve stared down at the little device as Scott murmured, "Thanks, dude," while taking the other piece of plastic from Stiles and recapping it. The boys stood up, Stiles still keeping a worried hand on Scott's shoulder.

"What is that?" Steve blurted out.

Both boys stared in askance, before Scott followed Steve's line of sight and said, "Oh, this? It's an inhaler." He looked quizzically between Steve's face and the inhaler, then handed it to Steve with a congenial shrug. "I guess they didn't have this in your day, huh?"

Steve dumbly shook his head, standing and taking it from Scott.

It was so…small.

> **This is actually what would trip Steve up the most. Devices to ease breathing did exist back in his day, but they would be big, expensive things kept in the home or in the hospital, not something you could carry around with you - meaning not something you could have when you were most likely to actually _have_ an asthma attack.  
> **   
> 

"It's a rescue inhaler," Stiles added. "An MDI - uh, meter-dosed inhaler."

> **My original plan for Talking Cure actually spanned all the way back to the first meetings with Steve, including this scene. Since I cut that, the reason why Stiles specifies here is because he thinks of nebulizers - a medication-inhaling system that did exist back in Steve’s day - as predecessors to the inhaler. While the core function is the same - turning a medication into a gas that can be breathed in - their methodologies are very different. More importantly, nebulizers were expensive (it’s doubtful Steve ever had one) and were machines kept at home. Even if Steve did have one, it’s not something he would’ve used to stem asthma attacks the way Scott does with his inhaler. While the same branch of studies that led to the nebulizers also led to inhalers, they are ultimately very different medical miracles.**

Scott frowned as he looked down at his inhaler in Steve's hand. "Wait, you had asthma before you became a supersoldier, right?" Steve nodded. "What did you guys do when you had asthma attacks?"

For a brief moment, Steve couldn't answer. He just stared at the little device that Steve would've paid in limbs for, that Bucky would've killed for. He was blindsided by the realization that these boys didn't know about all the little struggles that plagued Steve's every day for most of his life.

> **Which isn’t to say that the inhaler is some kind of miracle cure for asthma - it isn’t. It’s only a moderately miraculous mitigation of the most prominent and life-impugning symptom of asthma. But for someone like Steve, whose life was so strongly affected by that one prominent symptom, there is probably very little difference.**

That they didn't have to.

Steve swallowed and finally answered, "Breathing exercises, humidity if we could manage it, asthma cigarettes, that sort of thing-"

"Asthma _cigarettes_?" Scott asked incredulously. "Is that like, a weird name or a joke or something?"

Steve frowned. "No? Just cigarettes."

Both boys looked horrified, and Scott cried out, "But smoking _causes_ asthma!"

"Or makes it worse," Stiles grumbled, glaring fondly at Scott. Steve could see there was a story there.

He blinked, bewildered. "They…they were prescribed by my doctors."

> **These were absolutely a thing.  
> **   
>    
>    
>  **These were specifically “cigarettes” that instead of tobacco, contained herbs that supposedly eased asthma symptoms. Nightshade, up to a certain extent, can reduce vascular inflammation - but whatever effect it can achieve would be mitigated or erased entirely by the fact it was being inhaled as a smoke, and the plant causes nasty side-effects like hallucination, heart problems, etc., and overdosing on these is lethal. Despite all this, because smoking was seen as such a healthy thing to do back then, asthma cigarettes were prescribed even to pre-teens to treat their asthma (or, if an asthmatic wanted to smoke but couldn’t use tobacco, they would use this in its place).**

Scott's eyes bugged wide open at that, while Stiles stared at him like he expected Steve was pulling their legs.

"No wonder you had it so bad, then," Stiles finally said, shaking his head and letting his hand drop from Scott's shoulder.

"…yeah," Steve said, turning his attention back to the inhaler, turning it over and over in his hand.

After a few moments, Steve realized the boys were still standing there with silence that was disconcerting from anyone, let alone two teenagers. He looked up to see their matching expressions of concern.

> **Thoughtful babies are trying to be thoughtful.**

They glanced sidelong at each other.

"You okay, Steve?" Stiles asked.

Swallowing down a lump in his throat, he handed the little device back to Scott. "Yeah, I'm fine, I just…" He gestured to the inhaler. "I really could've used something like that, before…" He gestured to his own body. "This."

"I'll bet," Scott said, nodding sympathetically.

Stiles made a face. "Especially if they were trying to treat your asthma with _cigarettes_."

> **The vehement disparagement towards smoking and cigarettes is also something likely to surprise Steve. Even if people may have started to understand that smoking was causing lung problems back in Steve’s day, because smoking was so common and prevalent, no one really thought of it as unhealthy. The army even included cigarettes in soldiers’ rations!**

Steve laughed.

To his own ears, it had a wet edge to it, but the boys were either oblivious or polite, as neither of them said a word about it.

Shaking himself out of his stupor, Steve focused on Scott. "How are you feeling? Should we call it a day?"

Unsurprisingly, Scott shook his head. "No, I'm fine - I can handle it. We can finish."

> **Steve is very familiar with this particular brand of stubborn.**

Steve smiled - even more so when he looked at Stiles and saw familiar echoes of worried frustration in his gaze.

> **But that doesn’t mean he never understood the impact of his stubbornness on Bucky.**

"Sure thing," Steve said. He trusted that if Stiles wasn't protesting, then Scott really could handle finishing their planned work out for the day - even if they might have to take it a little easier from here on out.

Apparently, taking care of stubborn asthmatics was a Barnes family trait.

Bucky would've been so proud.

> **will be* ;)**


	7. (Steve) Family Photos

Ensconced in the Stilinskis' living room the next day, Steve looked at the photo of Sarah's son. Clad in a Navy service uniform, he stood beside a Sarah Barnes much older than Steve remembered her. And she wasn't actually a Barnes, anymore, not by the time her only son was on his way to Vietnam.

Not when she, unbeknownst to her, was seeing her son alive for the last time.

The photo was on the TV, with a song playing, the same song as the last three photos. Apparently, it was the big hit back then.

> **In my head, when I was writing this, it was _Mrs. Robinson_ , by Simon & Garfunkel. But then it turned out that was released in 1968, and this scene would’ve probably been a few years earlier. So I now it’s [_Desolation Row_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desolation_Row) by Bob Dylan. Partly because it’s long enough to last through three or four photographs with Stiles’ commentary…mostly because there are actually tons of other references buried in the song.**  
>    
>    
>    
>  **This is meant to be as much a pop-culture education for Steve as it is telling him about the Barnes family, so when Stiles asked the Sheriff for good songs, he suggested this one. He knows how Stiles often learns more from wiki walks than being told things, and he figures that if Steve does the same, then he can learn a lot from that one song. (Which does happen later in the fic when Steve looks up _American Pie_ ). My Chemical Romance - who’ve had a few songs in Teen Wolf - did a cover of Desolation Row, but it’s shit so I’m not linking to it.**

Steve missed the sensation of a physical album, something he could hold in his hand and turn the pages of. But, he could definitely see the appeal of Stiles' preferred format. He learned more about music from the last two hours of Stiles' slideshow than from the two dozen albums Tony had sent him over the last several months.

It helped to have context, to have memories attached to the songs - even if they weren't his own.

> **This is why producers will put a lot of money into music videos, even though they actually turn a fairly limited profit - the video is to make sure that listeners have a good context memory for that song.**

Music to go with the photos, videos from more recent times, and this whole show was backed up online somewhere. According to Stiles, no matter what happened, none of this would ever be lost. If the house burned down with every family photo ever taken inside it, these pictures would still be safe and sound somewhere in the world. Steve could never doubt the appeal of that - no matter how much me missed physical photo albums.

> **…whoops. he***

"Mom said that her Aunt Sarah came to live with them a couple years after the end of the war, when her husband left her," Stiles said, continuing on with his stories about the Barnes family. "She worked as a teacher, but she had to retire when it turned out she had cancer. She didn't want to die all sick and bed-ridden, so she used up all her money traveling and stuff, and then..."

> **In retrospect, I wonder if I should’ve given Aunt Sarah frontotemporal dementia, too. Also, I probably shouldn’t have used Sarah, since that’s already Steve’s mom’s name.**

Steve nodded in understanding. "I can sympathize."

Stiles blew out a nervous breath, and a moment later, the song ended. A new one began, and with it came a new photo - this time of Claudia and the Sheriff's wedding. The song was easy-paced, but not slow, a strumming guitar that sounded almost ukelele-like, with a gentle drumbeat in the background. It made Steve want to lean back and relax, especially after the more upbeat Beatles song that had come before it.

> **I spent ages trying to decide what song in particular this should be. Then I went, “fuck it!” and decided not to pick any particular one. This is a Beatles song of your choice, but coming from later in their career, sometime in their hippie phase.**

"This was a favorite of ours," the Sheriff said. His pile of paperwork sat long forgotten on a side table as he leaned back in his armchair, looking at the picture of himself and his wife posing in front of an elaborate altar. "At least one that we could both agree on." His smile took on a dopey turn that made Steve's heart try to hide deep in his gut. "This was our first dance as husband as wife."

> **Just imagine a very mellow Johnny Cage in an army dress uniform dancing like this. Do it. I dare you. :D**

As if on cue, the next photo came up. It was Claudia and John, alone on a dance floor, surrounded by a crowd of people watching them as they only watched each other. Claudia's dress was swirling around her calves, with John laughing as he leaned into her. Glancing to his side, Steve looked at the Sheriff and would bet his shield that twenty years later, John still remembered what Claudia said that was so funny.

Steve stared, and did his resolute best not to be envious of this man, not to run away from this house and this town and this entire, goddamn century.

He tried not to wonder if this is what he and Peggy could have looked like. What song would they have chosen for their first dance?

> **I’m kind of imagining this as something Frank Sinatra, but that’s about as far as I got before I remembered that I didn’t actually have to pick out a specific song, since Steve didn’t know what it was, anyway.**

"Their next dance was to an AC/DC song," Stiles said with a snicker. "You'll see that video in a few minutes. It's hilarious, Dad has this most constipated look on his face-"

"Your mother had many, many wonderful traits," the Sheriff said, with the comfortable voice of an old argument. "But good taste in music was not one of them."

> **The Sheriff brought the good music, Claudia brought the good movies, and now Stiles is a snob. :)**

Would Steve and Peggy have fought about music? Who is he kidding, of course they would've. They would've fought, and settled on something perfectly in the middle. Then the Commandos would've found a way to hijack the music and play something completely ridiculous anyway, and Bucky would've been warning Steve not to step on Peggy's toes while they danced and-

Well.

> **Steve absolutely imagined what his wedding to Peggy would look like, and the rest of their life together. He didn’t just lose the potential for his life when he went down in the ice, he literally lost all his dreams.**

It was never going to happen, now. Peggy was an old woman, wed and widowed twice over with no room in her life for a long-lost lover returned from the dead. And Bucky and the Commandos all _were_ dead.

Sometimes, Steve wished he still was, too.

(Maybe a bit more than sometimes.)

> **Vague suicidal ideation was absolutely a critical part of this chapter, to emphasize how much that declines over the rest of this story. Steve already had plenty of reasons to _not die_ , but Stiles is what gave Steve a reason to _live_.**

"I've heard a lot of that kind of music," Steve said, because now was not the time to start crying. "I'm not sure how you dance to it."

"You don't," the Sheriff drawled.

> **The Sheriff is very much of the opinion that modern ‘dancing’ is really just jumping and flailing around, not actual dancing.**

"You've heard a lot of _classic_ rock?" Stiles asked, emphasizing the adjective while looking at his father, even though his question was directed at Steve.

"Tony likes it," Steve said.

"See!" Stiles cried out, flailing in Steve's general direction. On the TV, the photo changed again, and again, several shots of John and Claudia dancing to whatever this song was. "Even Iron Man likes it!"

"Tony Stark isn't exactly known for having good taste," the Sheriff retorted. He finally looked away from all the photos of his wedding to focus on his son. "Have you watched his Expos?"

> **While I’m here: where did the Expo even happen? A lot of people - and apparently canon? - seem to assume it happened in Manhattan. Based on the movie, it didn’t take long for Tony to get from Malibu to the expo once he got the suit working again - but that’s almost 2,800 miles (4,500 km)! No way he made that in under an hour or even just a few hours. Also, there seemed to be a _lot_ of space at and surrounding the expo, and not many tall buildings, and that kind of urban sprawl is all particular to Los Angeles. I honestly just assumed the Expo was in Los Angeles until I saw people mention Manhattan in other places (namely fanfic).**

"Have I watched them," Stiles scoffed, shaking his head at the ridiculousness of the question. The Sheriff rolled his eyes.

Steve smiled sadly. The next photo of Stiles' fancy slideshow was a picture of a massive wedding cake, Claudia and John both poised with cake knives and ready to slice into it.

"Tony plays it in his lab, a lot," Steve said. "At least when it's just him. Bruce probably would've liked this song more. I'll have to ask."

The gentle song came to an end.

It was followed by the kind of noise that Tony adored and Bruce fondly complained about in every other text message he sent Steve. On screen, a young John groaned as Claudia laughed, waving her friends over from where the bridal party stood. Steve watched as several other couples and groups flooded the dance floor. Claudia kept poking and tugging John into dancing - though it looked more like jumping around than anything else. She was undeterred by the unholy combination of lead limbs and two left feet that her new husband was displaying. Instead, after a minute of unsuccessful goading, she kicked off her shoes, tossing them towards the couple's private table. The bride stood on the groom's feet, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and leaning into his chest as he held her close. Swaying in tune with the rock music, they were a spot of serenity in the middle of the ecstatic chaos of their friends leaping around to racket masquerading as music.

> **I like to imagine the song is ‘Shoot to Thrill’. ;)  
>    
>  **

"The music was terrible," John said, voice soft against the hard edges of the song. "But sometimes I think I liked this dance the most."

Steve heard a sniff from Stiles' direction, and pointedly didn't look. Instead, he watched the young Claudia and John 'dance', trying desperately not to wonder if Bucky would've liked this music, what he would've done at his niece's wedding.

Probably try to make Steve dance, too.

> **If Steve’s dream life had come true and he and Bucky lived to the ripe old age of ‘old enough to go to Claudia’s wedding’, then Bucky would absolutely drag Steve onto the dancefloor to show these damn young’uns what dancing really is. Steve would make Claudia take Bucky on an uncle-niece ‘dance’ (re: jumping and flailing around) in revenge.**


	8. (Steve) Keepsake

Steve had to leave.

The Sheriff sighed, Stiles protested, and even Scott asked if Steve was sure, but eventually they all accepted it when Steve said he had to leave.

(He had to leave now before he never wanted to again.)

> **Trying to summarize Steve's mental state in one pithy sentence took a lot more time and effort than I expected.**

Steve still needed to go check-in on Jim's family. Jim's granddaughter had already offered a tour of the vineyard, as well as some old photos that no museum had come asking for yet.

> **I get why they did it, but I wasn't a big fan of Steve seeming to not have any connection to the Howlies in the 21 st century - especially when we see him literally going through their files in his new apartment at the beginning of the Avengers. (I have a seriously hard time believing that Steve could be regularly visiting Peggy and apparently not once did she mention her niece who works for SHIELD.)**

He wanted to get those photos before some school or museum did. He wanted to see the west coast as a tourist, as he would've done before the ice. He wanted to dry up all his tears before he had to go back to doing SHIELD's wetwork.

> **I feel like I missed the mark on this one, but this bit was kind of intended to show that Steve was already making some progress, mentally, just from chilling with the Stilinskis for a week. He has wants, he is expressing those wants to himself, and he is pursuing them (even if he is only doing so in order to get back to his 'duty'). This is in contrast to most of his story thus far where he's basically just going along with whatever other people tell him to do or want to do.**

He needed to pack up Steve Rogers before he had to go back to being Captain America.

So here he was, getting ready to leave, cleaning up after himself and packing for the last stretch of road-

"Hey, Steve?"

Steve looked up from where he was trying to stuff his sketch book under his sweatpants in his duffel bag.

Stiles fidgeted in the doorway to the guestroom, holding his hands behind his back.

"Yeah?" Steve asked, setting the sketchbook down. He was probably going to unpack and repack half the bag, anyway - like he always did. He still wasn't sure if he believed Bruce's claim that he could pack things right the first time.

> **People who can fit everything into their bag/suitcase the first time they pack it are clearly sorcerers.**

"Uh, I, um. I know it's weird, but I wanted to give you something, y'know, a gift, or…a souvenir, I guess? Except I couldn't think of anything. Well, I couldn't think of anything that I could actually afford. And it's not like we have much going on here for there to be souvenirs of. Unless you wanted a fancy leaf from the preserve or something, I didn't…Um, anyway-"

His hands came around, revealing that one was holding something out to Steve.

An inhaler.

> **Again, for the record: I'd already made the decision on most of these inhaler feels _before_ Season 5A of Teen Wolf had the inhaler as such a big theme. (Which they then dropped for 5B. -_-)**

Steve took it with a heavy grain of confusion. "What…doesn't Scott need this?"

Stiles shook his head. "It's a really old one, a dead one. Scott lost it, got another one, then found it again, and used it dry and never remember to take it back for disposal. I asked him for it."

"I suppose I'll definitely remember playing lacrosse with you guys," Steve said. Was this a weird 21st century thing he was missing part of?

Stiles was shaking his head.

"It's not about that," Stiles said. "I couldn't think of a good 'something to remember us by' gift. So I thought of what other kinds of gifts there are, and I thought of welcome gifts. This is more of a…welcome to the 21st century gift."

Steve tilted his head, hoping Stiles would elaborate. Because out of everything that could exemplify modernity…why an inhaler?

> **Steve was still viewing the 21 st century as something of a 'foreign place' - somewhere he was visiting, not his home. So a token of would naturally be about 'exemplifying' modernity, as if it were a place he was visiting, instead of merely a facet of reality, as a place he now lived in and had to call home.**

"Just - you had this look on your face when we were watching the history channel and talking about the war and stuff," Stiles said, waving towards Steve's face apologetically. "Like…you were sad."

Steve swallowed. "Stiles-"

"Not like that!" Stiles blurted out. What did that even mean? Not like what? "I mean - you…" Stiles took a deep breath. "You pretty much died to stop one genocide, and then another one happened anyway. Several happened, just in other places and times."

> **Back when Talking Cure was supposed to extend this far back/when I was originally going to have Stiles' POV of this scene, this little flub was going to indicate some really weird train of thought/different interpretation. This was actually the biggest reason why, for so long, I argued with myself about whether to let Talking Cure start this far "back" or to start it much closer to the events of Teen Wolf. Ironically, I now can't for the life of me remember what I was going to have Stiles thinking during this moment.**

Way to remind him.

"And - I know you're disappointed," Stiles said. Steve opened his mouth to protest out of habit, but then closed it before he could insult Stiles' intelligence. "I would be, too. But that's not everything, you know? The last few decades hasn't just been everyone forgetting their history and doing all the stuff you were trying to stop. It's been awesome things, too. And not just music and comic books and stuff - awesome as they are. The technology behind rocket missiles is also behind rocket ships, and we use those to go into space. Diseases and medical conditions and all this other bad stuff that gutted your generation doesn't even appear in mine. I mean, when you were growing up, people were terrified of polio. Now, me and everyone else my age just got a few shots when we were little and we never have to think about it again."

> **Not gonna lie, this speech was in large part fuelled by exasperation with fandom's tendencies of portraying "the benefits of the 21 st century". When fans seem to write about how someone from the 1940's would view and react to various facets of the 2010's, people tended to get stuck on a.) a particular direction/perspective, and b.) a few specific things (predominantly domestic technologies and social progressivism/issues related therein). I tried to broaden that, here.**

Steve looked at Stiles, then stared down at the inhaler.

"I just…I think you don't need help remembering places you've been or people you've been with. But…it must be hard. To remember all the good things that have happened over the last few decades, when your job is to deal with all the bad stuff."

Stiles waved his hand towards the inhaler. "So this isn't to remind you about me or Beacon Hills, because I think you've got that covered. This is to remind you that however bad things got over the last seventy years, they got good, too. We couldn't beat politics, but we could beat polio. The rocket technology that brought cities down into craters also brought humanity up to the moon. Terrorist attacks and asthma attacks are always going to be a problem, but at least one of them can be stopped in its tracks with practically the push of a button. And maybe that'll make stopping the other one just a little bit easier."

> **I did originally have a sequence about Stiles researching late 20 th century history a lot in his efforts to help Steve acclimate to the 21st century. It was going to be a huge part of Stiles' POV, that he's constantly surprised by what he's learning and his efforts to "put that into context" for Steve. There was originally going to be a lot of exposition behind these particular exmaples/statements - Stiles starting to scratch the surface of the complexities of post-war politics and Vietnam War politics, the history of medicine and vaccinations, the history of rocket technologies in both military applications and space exploration, the rise of terrorism and its descent from guerilla warfare, the history of asthma treatments...and then realized all of it was about the _history_ of things, but most of it was just exposition that did not actually add to the story.**

Steve wrapped his fingers around the tiny medical device that would've changed his whole world growing up. His eyes were burning as he stepped forward to wrap Stiles in a tight hug.

> **So I boiled it down to this, instead: not how the world changed in the last 70 years, but how _Steve's_ world changed (or "how it would've changed", depending on how you look at it).**

"Thank you," he barely-didn't-sob into Stiles' ear.

> **I'm going to regret "barely-didn't-sob into Stiles' ear" until my dying day, I just know it.**

Stiles froze up in surprise, then wrapped his arms awkwardly around Steve's shoulders, patting his back. Steve sniffed, his humor equal to his amazement. Because this kid understood Steve's frustration within a week better than anyone else had in months. How did a hyperactive teenager see what dozens of adults and professional psychologists had missed?

> **(Stiles' POV was originally going to have an answer to this: in researching history, he was constantly imagining himself in those situations or events - and then just reversed it in his efforts to understand Steve. On top of that, there was a much broader fictional element as well: he thought of his favored sci-fi movies and franchises that take place in the future and what he would and would not care about or be intrigued by if he suddenly appeared in them...and then also applied this to Steve, with the sobering realization that this fictional allegory was _Steve's reality_.)**

"No problem," Stiles said, sounding a little unsure but genuine nonetheless.

> **But he is still a teenager, and one not particularly apt at dealing with feelings beyond hugging people. He does his best. :)**

Steve stepped back. He looked down at the little piece of plastic and metal in his hands, the one that helped millions of people, millions of _kids_ , breathe just a little bit better - and do everything else just a little bit easier. And he knew how much it changed not just the lives of those with tricky lungs, but their friends, too.

Bucky and Stiles alone were proof of that.

> **The biggest difference between the "tourist" view of the 'future' vs the "resident" view - and my frustrations with fandom as manifested in this chapter - is that so many people kept portraying Steve as some kind of outside observer of the 21 st century. This was an effort to mitigate that effect, because he isn't just an outside observer - this is his world, and 'integrating' wasn't about how the future looks as an outsider, but what the future would or can look like as an insider, as someone who lives here...because he now does.**

It didn't come in time to change Steve's world, but it did come in time to change Scott's.

All the fancy gadgets this new millenium had to offer, and this was the first one that made Steve feel like his sacrifice had been worth it.

> **No one can save everyone, and Steve knows that he couldn't save everybody - and that many (if not most) of the lives he _did_ save are now dead, anyway, after seventy years. Intellectually knowing all the good his sacrifice doesn't help with the fact the results were/are so far away, that he was too late to really see or experience the benefits of that sacrifice. This, on the other hand, is something tangible, something he can _literally_ feel because he's holding it in his hand.**


	9. (Steve) Steve and Stiles Text a Lot

Steve had honestly feared that his phone number would end up publicized when he gave it to Stiles. Nothing against the kid, but Steve remembered being a teenager desperate to impress everyone.

It never happened.

> **Back when Stiles' POV was originally gonna go this far, I had a vague idea of Stiles _considering_ sharing Steve's number/showing off to everyone that he's related to Captain America, but then something happens to his dad on the job. Something very minor, but Stiles realizes that what just happened with his dad was tiny/barely a blip compared to what would happen with "Captain America", so he opts not to.**

Instead, Stiles texted him all the time - more than Tony, even, which was not really that surprising once Steve thought about it.

It was mostly little things. Pictures of his daily life - usually him and Scott goofing off - and pictures of food or drinks that Steve _just had to try it's amazing omg_. Just before his school started for him, Steve often came back from missions to find long strings of text messages about how much school sucked and teachers sucked more and homework sucked the most.

> **Stiles texting Steve all the time was very intentional. He was well aware that Steve "was sad all the time" and did his best to cheer him up.**

The first time Steve happened to check his personal messages in SHIELD was just after a review meeting. He ended up chuckling to himself at the picture of a stack of textbooks accompanied by horrified-looking 'smiley faces'. Emoticons, that's what they were called.

> **Given the limited means of long-distance communication in Steve's day, there was a much stricter divide between the personal and professional than there is today. Unless an emergency telegram was sent to your workplace, or an urgent phone call came through, you'd never receive/open personal communications at work. This increasingly blurry line between the personal and professional would be weirder to Steve than the technology itself.**

"What's so funny?" Natasha asked, peeking over Steve's shoulder to his phone. Steve tilted the phone to show her, trying to keep the screen away from the sunlight coming through the glass walls of the Triskelion's fancy elevator. From Steve's other side, Clint also leaned in. "Oh, your kid in California?"

"He's not my kid," Steve said. "He's just..." He paused, trying to figure out how to describe Stiles in relation to himself. "A friend."

"Poor kid," Clint said, shaking his head while looking at the picture. "Makes me kinda glad I never went to high school."

Steve snorted, and started composing a text back. He had to remind himself to forgo greetings, to act as if this was a chat.

> **Sending someone written communication without some form of salutation (like you start and end a letter) would also be weird to him, also possibly a little moreso than the technology itself. Steve's used to radically new technologies - it's the cultural changes that'll do him in more.**

Which it was. It took Steve ages to understand that texting wasn't meant to be correspondence, but conversation.

> **We don't realize it today, but a _conversation_ in a text-based medium would be alien to Steve. Yes, letters obviously existed, and telegrams, but those were one-way communications or long-term exchanges. Having a conversation (a direct, live exchange of communication) in a text-based medium would take a little getting used to for him. We've only had the capacity for text-based conversations for the last three decades or so, and it's only really become widespread and easily accessible over the last 15-20 years.**

And in this one, his first response was exactly what he'd say if he'd been with Stiles right now.

_Wait until you get to college._

By the time Steve got down to the garage and was about to get on his bike, his phone vibrated with a new message.

Instead of any words, Stiles' response was a series of crying emoticons. Steve couldn't help but smile, and decided to wait before scaring Stiles with the kinds of documents he had to read on a daily basis for work.

It wasn't just day-to-day life, either. Stiles turned out to be a valuable wellspring of information. His explanation of memes made so much more sense than Tony's - by virtue of making sense at all. He sent Steve entire websites full of them, and picture after picture of the most popular ones.

> **A huge difference between Millenials, and earlier generations, is how accustomed younger people are to just finding immediate information. Yes, previous generations have had things like libraries for research - but it was a time-consuming process, so tiny little tid-bits of information usually were just left unanswered or pieced together through other means. Being able to easily find "small" pieces of information (i.e. Googling an answer, Wikipedia, etc.), being able to find information about something _on a whim_ (as opposed to needing to actively set out to find it) - that's one of the biggest differences between younger/contempoary generations and older ones.**

Steve sent back the picture of the Grumpy Cat, telling Stiles that it woulda been Bucky's favorite.

> **This was absolutely foreshadowing, by the way. :P**

The childish part of Steve enjoyed the sensation of trying not to laugh the first time he asked if he could 'has' an MRE while waiting to go to Damascus with a joint operations team. Tony looked ready to cry.

> **MRE = Meal, Ready to Eat, which is the modern term for military field rations.**

"No," Tony said, shaking his head woefully, standing in front of the jet. Then he narrowed his eyes when he noticed Steve's mirth. "That's not - Steve, you can't be a troll, you can't."

Steve frowned. "How am I a troll?"

Tony threw his hands up in the air in frustration and stalked to the pilot's seat. Tony couldn't take the Iron Man suit all the way to Syria, so he was flying the jet, instead.

With a sigh, Steve texted Stiles, _What's a troll?_

> **You, Steve, _you_.**

A few minutes later, his phone chimed and he read, _Mythological troll or Internet troll?_

_Well, I know what the mythological one is._

He paused, then added, _I just got called a troll._

Then they were up in the air, where they couldn't use cell data. By the time Steve landed, he got his explanation.

_Online, a troll is someone who posts or says aggravating stuff just to start an argument, piss people off, etc etc. Gets used in other places to mean someone who is messing things up just for the sake of messing things up. In real life, it's what you call someone who makes a joke or whatever just to see a funny reaction or make someone uncomfortable. It's a pretty broad spectrum._

And then another message right after:

_So basically, a troll is someone who likes to mess with people. Can mean the funny way when used in real life (as in it can be funny for the troll and everyone else). But mostly means the annoying sense online (so only the troll and some fellow trolls think they're funny, everyone else just hates them)._

And finally:

_Also gets used as a verb, like "to troll someone", and this is more likely to mean funny than annoying._

> **When you think about it, troll, trolls, and trolling is a very elaborate concept. We all use it and apply it fairly correctly without a second thought - but almost none of us ever learned this concept in school, and most of us could never tell anyone else where or when exactly we "learned" these terms or this overall concept.**

As everyone disembarked, Steve looked at Tony and said, "I didn't mean to troll you, you know."

He looked at Steve dubiously. "Really?"

> **I'm thinking of a Snowflake of this moment. My intention was that Tony, still accustomed to depressed!Steve, isn't sure what to make of this interaction at first. This is the first time he's seeing Steve exhibit a sense of humor, or humor in general. This entire scene/section of the story was the Avengers getting to see this personable side of Steve - which only happened because Steve, in turn, was _able_ to open up because of Stiles' influence.**

"Really," Steve said, clapping a hand on Tony's shoulder. Hoping he was remembering the phrasing right, he added, "Ain't nobody got time for that."

Tony was still twitching by the time they got to the meeting room.

Along with sending Steve useful notes - in one case literally - about the modern world, he was also an excellent background researcher for Steve...and an excellent sounding board for his tough decisions.

> **TV Tropes has[Useful Notes](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UsefulNotes) with some intros or guides to topics that might be of interest to fiction writers. :)**

Just before Halloween, the Smithsonian asked Steve to consult on an exhibit they were developing. Steve, in turn, asked Stiles for any help with understanding all the problems with history education in America.

> ***sneakily sneaks in an anti-historicism agenda into fanfic***

Blogs, books, articles - Steve was still reading through a website on his way to the meeting with the museum director, the curators, and some of the more influential fat cats financing the new exhibit.

> ***sneakily sneaks in the occasional anachronism***

Steve sat through some stupid, inspirational speech about how people could benefit from learning the true impact Captain America and the Howling Commandos had in WWII. After that was a more useful meeting about how much public demand there was for learning about all the Heroes of New York. With Captain America and Iron Man being at the top of the list, the exhibit could generate a lot of revenue for the Smithsonian.

Then, they asked him for his thoughts.

"Rule number one," he said. "No whitewashing."

The director twitched, puzzled. The curators, historians all of them, actually smiled and seemed relieved when he said that.

> **The likelihood of all of them being actively against historicism and historical racism is actually pretty low but fuck it, let's cut Steve a break.**

"What exactly do you mean, Captain?" one of the donors asked, eyes narrowing.

"I've seen a lot of books and documentaries about me and my team, how history has remembered us," Steve said. "And most of them downplay the contributions of my teammates who weren't white and gloss over their unique challenges." He pursed his lips. "They deserve better than that. A lot better. So don't whitewash - and prioritize me over them as little as possible."

Half the people at the table started to protest, so Steve held up a hand, quieting them instantly.

"My advanced abilities are helpful in a war, but that's not why I was able to accomplish somuch," Steve said. "I was nothing without my team, then and now. History has forgotten that. Generations have grown up not understanding the extent of the challenges we faced and _real_ sacrifices we made. It's your job as historians to remind them, and to teach them."

It would be a lie to say the meeting went smoothly after that, but it went a lot smoother than if Steve hadn't made that little aside. The curators and historians themselves were in Steve's boat, well aware of the problems with history education and more than eager to fix it.

> **Though don't let this fool you, there are still plenty of historians who don't give two shits about historicism and historical racism. ~~Like the entire fucking History Channel for starters.~~**

He could see some hesitance on the part of the financial backers. But by the end of the meeting, none of them were able to stand up to Captain America and tell him that his teammates should get less attention than him.

Sometimes, being a historical icon had its perks.

Unfortunately, it also had a tendency to lead to people to underestimate his humanity.

> **I really wanted to incorporate the two "sides" of being a celebrity/icon - how it can be a good/useful thing, but also why it isn't always so.**

"...your dog tags?"

Steve stared at the director. "What?"

The director smiled congenially.

"Your dog tags, Captain - they would make an invaluable addition. They are an excellent example of how the Army conducted its business, and say so much about a soldier in such a little space. I understand you don't need them today, as their regulations are so different."

Steve swallowed, and said, "Let me get back to you on that."

The director seemed surprised, but nodded. The curators were all glaring at their boss where he couldn't see them. So was one of the backers, an old man whose eyeroll at the request made Steve wonder if he'd ever served in the military.

> **Dog tags are a bit like wedding rings or glasses. To the person wearing them, they are merely everyday object of no ritual significance...but they hold a great deal of meaning/importance, which tends to not get noticed until they are threatened or go missing. Servicemen and -women might tend to treat their dogtags as a particularly or slightly annoying necklace, but that doesn't mean they _are_.**

Steve never asked.

Instead, he told everyone he knew about the request.

Half of them said to give them over - to let his past go and move on with his life. The other half told him to keep them, to not let the museum take away one of the few pieces of his past he still had left.

Stiles asked, "What do you want to do?"

Steve stared at the counter where he was assembling the ingredients to make pad thai. He fiddled with the bluetooth earpiece in his ear, the actual phone itself sitting on the opposite counter behind Steve. "That's just it - I don't know."

> **Steve surrounded by modernity (Pad Thai, blue tooth, mobile phone) while debating his history (the dog tags).**

"Okay," Stiles said. There was a clacking of keys in the background, which Stiles had insisted was homework and which Steve guessed was anything but. "So why do you keep them?"

Steve swallowed, reaching into his shirt to pull out the dog tags in question. He had to wear regulation identifiers in the field, but otherwise he wore these all the time - 24/7, as the phrase was today.

> **As a more intelligence-oriented agency, I doubt dog-tags would be standard SHIELD wear, especially if they recruit _out_ of other military organizations a lot.**

"I've had these dog tags with me from the beginning," Steve said. "When I got them, it was a farce, but - I even had them in my pocket when I first stormed that HYDRA base to go rescue Bucky, you know? I'd forgotten about them. I was doing a show and sometimes little kids asked to see them so I got used to keeping them on me and-" He swallowed. "They've been with me through every battle, every mission, every moment, and even in the ice. I went down wearing these, and came back up wearing these."

"Right," Stiles said. "So, opposite question: what would you gain if you gave them away?"

> **Contrapositives FTW!**

Steve sighed.

"...moving on," Steve said. "Closing that chapter of my life for good." He took a deep breath. "And - from a sentimental standpoint and an educational one, I can see the value of them having it."

"But aren't you already giving them your old uniform?" Stiles asked.

> **Stiles is very good at recognizing when someone is lying/trying to lie to themselves.**

Steve huffed humorlessly. "True." He poked at the chicken he still had to slice for his latest cooking experiment. "But dog tags do mean a lot - both to how the army functions, and in what they meant to the people wearing them. Kids could learn a lot, and maybe some of their parents, too. Me and Bucky used to joke about our dog tags matching each other, you know? We'd both listed his Ma as our next of kin, and I'd lived with them before joining Project Rebirth, so apart from our names and blood types, they were exactly the same. We both even had left our religions off."

"How come?" Stiles asked.

"The USO kept mine off because it would've looked bad for an American icon to be Catholic," Steve said. "It's not such a big deal, today, but back then - well, people had opinions about Catholics. And a lot of Jews didn't say what their religions were on their dog tags, to protect themselves in case they were captured by Nazis."

> **Added aside: it hasn't come up yet, but it will, that Steve the dog tags Bucky went into the field with as a Howling Commando (the one Steve just described) were his second set. His first set did state his religion...and that was the basis upon which HYDRA singled him out for experimentation. All the Howling Commandos got a new set of dog tags without religion on them to make it less obvious that there was a _reason_ Steve and Bucky didn't have them. Bucky's original set are in the museum with the few of his remaining military effects.**

"Steve," Stiles said. Steve realized the clacking of computer keys in the background had stopped. "Is trying to 'close that chapter of your life' really a good idea?"

"It's...not like I'm going back," Steve pointed out.

"Exactly," Stiles said. "I'm probably stretching this metaphor a bit too far, but even if I can only read something for the first time once, I can reread it as much as I want. I go back to old books all the time."

"You think I shouldn't?"

"I think that you shouldn't let go of your past because it's what you 'should' do or what everyone wants you to do," Stiles said. He paused, then said, "You know, most of the movies in the living room were my mom's?"

Steve shook his head, then remembered to say, "I didn't."

"Right," Stiles said. "Well, she was a big movie buff, especially sci-fi. Dad used to say she had the good movies and he had the good music." Steve laughed, and Stiles continued. "My mom is gone, now - but the stuff she loved is still here. It's a bit like having a little bit of her back every time I watch one of her movies." There was a pause.

"Stiles?"

"But sometimes," Stiles admitted. "It's a little too much. I still cry sometimes when I watch Star Wars because it - it was our thing, y'know? So I don't really watch it with other people-"

"You watched it with me," Steve cut in, confused.

"I did say sometimes," Stiles pointed out. "And I mean - if you'd lived, you basically would've been Mom's uncle, right?"

> **Stiles has very complicated feelings towards Star Wars, but in this, they're simple: Steve was looking for the last traces of the last family he knew, and a soft spot for sci-fi goes back generations. (Remember, Bucky was the one who took Steve to the World of Tomorrow fair, not the other way around.)**

"I would like to think so," Steve said softly, giving up on the noodle experiment for now and reaching into the fridge for a soda.

"So, y'know, that was different. But most of the time, there is a really high likelihood of leaking from the face to happen, so I'm - cautious. But back to the point I was trying to make: I still have all of Mom's movies. I've seen them all before, but that doesn't mean I don't like to sometimes watch them again."

He paused again, then added, "And I can share them with other people."

"There aren't copies of my dog tags," Steve said dryly, then froze. "But that is an idea..."

"What?"

Steve swallowed. "Let them borrow my dog tags to make replicas."

"Huh." Silence, then the sound of a word being typed into Stiles' computer. "That could actually work. It's not like it matters whether it's actually the real thing or not, when no one is touching it or anything. It would stay behind glass, right?"

> **Having originals matters when museums are actively studying an object, even if that object is on display between studies. However, if it's only purpose is as display, then it doesn't matter so much.**

"Yeah," Steve said with a smile. "Thanks. I think I'll do that."

"Happy to help," Stiles said proudly. "And I think Mom would've been happy to help, too."

"I'm sure she would," Steve said. He had a thought, then laughed as he said, "And out of all the things for you two to inherit from Bucky, I'm somehow not surprised it's this."

"Bucky?" Stiles asked, surprised.

"He loved this stuff," Steve said. "Science fiction, speculative fiction, comics, everything. Last night before he shipped out to Europe, and out of everything there was to do in town, where did he take us? The World of Tomorrow fair." Steve smiled wryly at his fridge, cracking open the soda. "Hell, once he got over all the danger I put myself in for it, he even thought Project Rebirth was swell. He wouldn't admit it where anyone else could hear - especially Howard - but he did."

> **Given that Steve met Erskine at the World of Tomorrow fair, Captain America would never have existed if Bucky hadn't insisted on that double date on his last night before leaving.**

Stiles laughed. "Good to know I'm keeping the family tradition alive, then."

"You will be once you make Scott watch the Star Wars movie," Steve teased. Stiles groaned, and Steve laughed. "Hey, Stiles?"

"Yeah?"

"Thank you," he said sincerely. "For listening to me whine about this."

"No problem," Stiles said. "Good luck with the Smithsonian. If those guys are anything like my history teacher, you'll need it."

> **I believe the teacher killed by the piano wire in 3A was a history teacher...? >:)**

He didn't, in the end. While there were some disappointed looks, ultimately everyone acquiesced when Steve said it was a replica or nothing.

It was a good compromise, and it was mostly thanks to Stiles.

The sheer amount of help Steve got from Stiles made him tremendously grateful when he was able to return the favor.

It had been by accident. Stiles was bemoaning his decision to tackle an advanced English course that was meant for students a year older than him. He'd sent Steve a picture of his copy of King Lear, groaning about how dense and nonsensical it was and how "even Sparknotes isn't helping".

> **Personally, I despised Shakespeare (and most classical literature in general) in high school. Ironic that I'm now in a fandom about high school kids that so regularly and heavily references Shakespeare. :P**

Smiling, Steve sent back a long text explaining it.

_King Lear plans to split his kingdom between 3 daughters, giving them land based on how much they love him. Two oldest ones are liars, giving him lots of bullshit about how much they adore him. Youngest one just says she loves him like a father, which is "not enough". King Lear banishes her and gives his kingdom to the other two. They later turn on him, while the youngest is there for him when he needs her. There's a war between Lear & his youngest vs the other two, and everyone is dead by the end while someone else ends up King._

> **But this was also something of a reminder, as well, that not all of the world as Steve knows it is new. Some things are still older than him, and that includes the majority of English/American literature.**

Then Steve put away his phone to go have his meeting with Fury about the latest snafu in Latveria. It devolved into Steve and the other tactical officers sitting there twiddling their thumbs as Fury and the Eastern Europe Chair went back and forth about Victor Von Doom's latest antics and their implications for global security. For the first time, Steve understood why people were so blasé about checking their phones during long, boring meetings. Steve could have pulled out his tablet and played Tony's favorite music and Fury wouldn't have noticed.

> **Whoops. When setting up the Sokovia/Latveria thing during Stilinskis' visit to New York, I forgot about this reference. Um, Steve's geography isn't actually the best? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯**

But he didn't. Instead, Steve checked his phone under the table to see Stiles' text. _OMG THANK YOU. Makes more sense, now. Well, as much sense as Shakespeare ever makes._

 _No problem,_ Steve texted back. Then, remembering Stiles' earlier message, he added, _What's Sparknotes?_

Stiles send Steve a link, that turned out to be some kind of summary of King Lear. Except no, not just a summary - there were also analyses of the chapters, notes on symbolism, the meanings...

Intrigued, Steve explored. It didn't take him long to find notes for most of the books people had recommended to him and Steve hadn't ever felt the desire to read.

> **You know the phrase "classics are books everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read"? Yeah, I suspect Sparknotes/Cliffsnotes are how Steve would catch up with most 'new' literature or literary classics.**

For the next few weeks, Steve always went through this website in his dead time. Waiting in line, commuting, and yet more meetings where he was more prop than participant. He "read" nearly three dozen books in less than a month, all the stuff that had become common reading in Steve's time in the ice and that he had missed.A few of them even sounded good enough for him to go, get, and read the actual books.

> **I basically never directly/actually read most of the works assigned in English classes after a certain point of high school. I just read the summaries or Sparknotes online, and if they intrigued me, _then_ I would actually read some of the things assigned - ironically enough, though, this would usually be well after we read it/went over it in class, anyway.**

Then he'd started poking around the other sections, learning more new math and science in a few days online than in weeks of SHIELD briefings.

It compounded when Stiles, upon hearing this, pointed Steve towards other websites, YouTube channels, and even a few books that were far more helpful than the textbooks and learning programs SHIELD had gotten him. Steve had never felt more lied to and educated than when he finished _A People's History of the United States_. He learned more about the Bible from an _Don't Know Much About_ book than years of church. The combined sadness and exasperation of that fact was subsumed by all the hours he lost exploring Khan Academy. Medieval POC almost made him want to go back to art school. Then he remembered why this blog existed in the first place, and felt almost glad he'd never finished.

> **_A People’s History of the United States_ is a fantastic history book that tells American history from minority perspectives. ~~Looking at you, History Channel.~~ You can read it online for free [here](http://www.historyisaweapon.com/zinnapeopleshistory.html). :) Caveat: this book, project, and movement is often criticized for being an extremely slanted telling of history, limited and scope, and reliant on biased or questionable sources. The thing is, this isn’t meant to be a comprehensive, one-stop source of American history. It exists specifically to counteract the dominant narrative of American history.  
> **   
>  **[Don’t Know Much About the Bible](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57795.Don_t_Know_Much_About_the_Bible) is a wonderful historical study of the Bible as historical literature - meaning it’s not just religious indoctrination or spiritual study, but lots of really valuable history and literary analysis. For those of you still in high school, just starting college, or interested in an introduction to a new subject, [Khan Academy](https://www.khanacademy.org/) is your friend.**  
>    
>  **[Medieval POC](http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/) is an art history blog that aims to showcase art with people of color and counteract the narrative that there were no white people in European history, or they were only ever slaves. This blog gets embroiled in a lot of controversy, and that’s mostly a result of the disconnect between the blog’s target audience and its actual audience. (It's targeted to American audiences and art history, but obviously things get confusing when European bloggers see the blog in isolation. The blog functions to counteract prevailing understandings of history as per American-Western tradition. AKA Whenever fantasy nerds try to claim that having all-white characters in their works is just some kind of bullshit historical accuracy, this blog is to call them out on their shit.)**

****

Somewhere in there, he ended up finding all sorts of drawing tutorials on his own. Soon, he found himself burning up a ridiculous amount of his salary on art supplies that would've made his old art teachers weep with joy.

He'd spent a week using every new art technique he learned on a portrait of his best friend as Steve remembered him. Not as Captain America's sidekick, or even the war hero Sergeant Barnes, but as Bucky, the overprotective trouble-maker who took Steve under his wing and kept him there no matter how many times the world tried to tear them apart. Steve even made his own craft frame, and the portrait of Bucky in his old work clothes took pride of place in Steve's living room.

> **Steve's memories vs History: Round ∞**

Steve sent Stiles a picture of it, and Stiles sent back a string of thumbs-up symbols.

Eventually, Steve filled his walls with other things, as well. His own memories of his mother (and a whole lotta nothing about his father), the Howling Commandos as they'd never been filmed, Howard when the cameras were gone, Peggy as the agent she was instead of the woman people wanted her to be...

> ******From the Captain America comics:**  
>    
>    
> 

She'd chided him when Steve had given her a picture he'd drawn of her shooting at him. The bottom quarter of the page was taken up by the inside of the shield as the rest of it showed Peggy lowering her gun, eyes fierce and form perfect.

"Did I ever apologize for that?" Peggy asked him softly, tracing the edge of her hair in the drawing.

> **That incident was only a few years ago for Steve, but almost exactly seventy years ago for Peggy.**

"No need," Steve said. "I completely deserved it. I should never have said that about you and Howard."

Peggy smiled, reaching over to grab Steve's hand in her own.

"It's a shame we never got some fondue, ourselves."

"I hear they sell kits, these days," Steve said, wrapping his large hands around her withered ones. "If I can sneak it past your nurses, we can have some in here."

Peggy scoffed. "Better to just break me out of here. I still haven't seen your apartment, you know."

> **She knows she can't be broken out of there. But she can dream.**

"I can hook up a, uh, webcam? Give you a video tour?"

" _Virtual_ tour, Steve, virtual tour..." Peggy shook her head. "No. I want to see it in person."

She didn't even look like she could make it to the restroom on her own, let alone survive a jailbreak, but Steve nodded along anyway.

Probably the most valuable thing Steve learned from Stiles, though, was how to find things himself. A simple tutorial on how to use Boolean logic in Google searches led to various pages on how most people actually used search engines, how websites structured their own "discoverability" to that, and what SEO even meant.

> **This part was important because while there's a lot to be said for Steve gaining social interaction by talking to other people, he is also struggling with agency and self-sufficiency/security. Being able to find answers on his own gives him a measure of security and safety - as well as makes talking to people an option, rather than a requirement.**

While a little ridiculous, Steve felt incredibly accomplished once he realized the best way to figure out that song Clint kept singing was to just look up a few of the lyrics. Steve ended up learning more music history just from the background of American Pie than the books Tony had recommended.

The next time Clint started singing along to the song when it came up on the radio, Steve chimed in on the chorus. Clint's grin could've blinded the whole jet. Despite still being covered in mud and blood from their mission, eyes dark with nearly three days of sleep loss, Steve had never seen Clint so happy since the day Phil Coulson died.

> **Incidentally, here's Jeremy Renner singing Miss American Pie:  
>  **  
> 

Thanks to his new search skills, Steve also stumbled across gay history.

He'd just been trying to get an inkling of what might've happened to some old friends of his, clubs he'd gone to back in his day. He'd ended up drawn into page after page of history and politics and new understanding. Stiles called it a "wiki walk" or "research wormhole".

> From the days of Dorothy to Stonewall to the AIDS crisis, and all the political debates today from "coming out" to conversion therapy, he read about it all. He kept abreast of the gay marriage movement, the occasional person of Steve's interest either coming out, or having come out ages ago and no longer being remarkable for it.

Yet somehow, none of it really hammered into Steve how lackadaisical about homosexuality the 21st century could be. Instead, that understanding came due to a text from Stiles.

_Achilles and Patrocalus were totes gay for each other, no wonder everyone thinks me and Scott are dating._

It was hard to forget how casual Scott and Stiles had been about admitting that Stiles' personal fantasy figure was a man. Biting his lip in the privacy of his own apartment, Steve tested the waters by texting back, _Well, at least you two would make a cute couple._

_WE WOULD BE THE CUTEST. But Scott is basically my brother, so also the grossest._

Steve grinned and tried not to cry as he wondered if everyone today would have assumed he and Bucky were dating, the way they acted together.

> **Queer culture, gay communities, and all sorts of non-heteronormative subcultures have been around for most of American history. The difference is that today, people are open and casual about it.**

They wouldn't have been right...but they wouldn't have been wrong, either. Facebook even had an option for this, though Steve wasn't sure how the terminology worked. were you in an "it's complicated" with someone, or were you someone's "it's complicated"?

Even in its simplicity, Steve's relationship with Bucky had been the most complicated in his life.

But both Bucky and the man Steve used to be were dead, so now it was also the most irrelevant.

> **Oh Steve. T_T**

He tried not to think about it. He tried not to wonder if he and Bucky could've been a force for good after the Stonewall Riots. Or if they could've been one of those old couples on the news who'd been together for decades and only just got married when it was legalized. Would they have just gone to a courthouse or held a full wedding?

Steve thought of those videos of Claudia's ceremony. Would she have gone to her Uncle Bucky's wedding? Maybe she would've been a flower-girl if she were young, or a bridesmaid if she were older.

He wondered what song he and Bucky would've danced to, and lost the evening to his own grief again.

But unlike before, it was only the evening. He had a nightmare that night, but was able to spend some time drawing and reminiscing. Eventually, he was able to get back to sleep, and the next morning woke up to lots of turkey.

Both in the figurative sense of Thanksgiving fervor having taken over the radio, television, and newsfeed seemingly overnight, as well as a literal sense, in the form of a mission in Ankara, Turkey.

The briefing officer looked ready to eat his own tablet due to all the terrible puns people kept making for the entire meeting. Some of them were even funny.

> **You heard it here last: puns are the lowest form of humor. XP**

The humor went away as soon as the new STRIKE team sergeant asked him if he had any plans for Thanksgiving.

"...I don't really have any family to make plans with," Steve pointed out.

Agent Rumlow blinked in surprise, then said, "Well hey, plenty of loners in SHIELD. Training division throws a party every Thanksgiving for everyone who can't or doesn't want to go home." He leaned into Steve conspiratorially. "If you go, find the research division's table. They spike their punch with something most of us are pretty sure isn't even legal in most countries."

> **This line was a lot of fun. Here's a fun, fluffy scene and chapter full of cute family interactions...and then a sudden, subtle reminder of the threat looming just underneath the surface. >:)**

Steve smiled. Seventy years and the best secret was still who had the best booze. "I'll keep that in mind."

That was going to be the end of that, right up until Fury had asked off-handedly if Steve was going to be busy that week, and ended up surprised that Steve was planning on going to the party.

"What else would I do?" Steve had asked in the face of Fury's confusion.

"I thought you would've seen that kid you're texting all the time," Fury said.

> **Fury doesn't even bother trying to hide his total disregard for people's privacy.**

Steve pursed his lips. "Thanksgiving is a family event, sir, and I - I don't know them that well."

"So?" Fury asked. "You've talked more with that kid in the last few months than I have with my mother in the last few years, I still see her when I can on the holidays."

"...how do you know how much I'm talking to him?" Steve asked, narrowing his eyes at his superior officer.

"Do you really want me to answer that?" Fury asked. Then he shook his head wryly. "Just call the kid, Cap, invite them over to your place for Thanksgiving dinner. It would do you some good."

"I'm not going to intrude on a family I don't have!" Steve snapped.

Fury raised an eyebrow over the eyepatch, and pointedly turned their attention back to the latest reports on the Ten Rings.

For almost a week, Steve tried to put the suggestion out of his mind. The problem was that the more you tried not to think about something, the more you ended up thinking about it.

Thinking about the difference between a work party and a family dinner. Thinking about how his last two Thanksgivings had been in Europe seventy years ago, surrounded by people who didn't really celebrate it but were always happy to throw a party at even the flimsiest of excuses. Thinking about the mystery poultry they'd roasted over low fires, sharing with the French resistance fighters who'd decided that America was onto something with a holiday dedicated to stuffing themselves silly.

> **Military Thanksgivings in WWII were actually a really big deal. Because soldiers mostly subsisted on rations, a tremendous amount of effort was put in to make sure proper Thanksgiving meals were available even for infantry and marines (who tended to get the worst food). Visiting or passing Europeans often described it as ‘Christmas come early’, for whom Thanksgiving was a real treat since the holiday wasn’t a part of their culture. The exuberance over Thanksgiving food/dinners in rations environments (both overseas and at the homefront) contributed to the emphasis on Thanksgiving dinners in the holiday today.**

Finally, Steve called Stiles and asked him what he usually did for Thanksgiving dinner.

"Lunch," Stiles deadpanned.

"...huh?"

Stiles laughed. "Unfortunately, crime and medical problems don't really stop for the holidays. There always needs to be at least a few cops on duty and a few nurses on call. So me, Dad, Melissa, and Scott make a sort of Thanksgiving lunch, then me and Scott take the leftovers to our parents for dinner at the hospital and the Sheriff's station. Me and Scott never minded, and this means one more cop and one more nurse that can go home to their families. Why? Wanna come?"

> **I wanted to have them doing something unique for Thanksgiving, not just dinner, and since both Melissa and the Sheriff are different types of first-responders/emergency workers, this seemed like a good way to go about it. I honestly think that Melissa and the Sheriff both would lose a lot of their enthusiasm over the traditional dinner after losing their spouse, and as such both would honestly not mind working that night, with their only concern being their sons. Hence the new tradition of lunch - all the great food, tradition, and family feels, without the bad memories or feeling of someone being missing to drag them down.**

Steve clutched the phone and stared at his bedroom ceiling at the flippant invitation.

"...I don't want to intrude," he said. He didn't want to face a family that wasn't his...but it's not like the four of them were a family, either, at least in anything other than choice. Then again, that was sometimes the most powerful kind of family of all.

Steve still remembered the day some young rabbi-in-training had nearly gotten his head beaten in by a pack of little old ladies when he'd tried to kick Steve out of a Passover Seder because he wasn't officially the Barnes' family. The actual rabbi had welcomed Steve without a second thought, and with far more grace than the Father at Steve's church had accepted Bucky when he tagged along with Steve and Ma on Christmas.

> **Today, people inviting friends over to each other’s religious holidays and ceremonies happens all the time (at least in big cities and other diverse environments). But back then it would’ve been incredibly rare, and in some cases even taboo. The Catholic Church still had a lot of codified anti-Semitism, and Jewish communities were often much more reclusive back then. However, that’s doctrine - reality has always seen people crossing barriers and making new friends all the time. Even 1930s rabbis wouldn't have stood a chance against a bunch of grandmas who want to try and fatten up Bucky’s sickly friend. :P**

"Dude, no worries, Melissa probably won't mind, Scott would dig it, and..." There was some noise, some footsteps in the distance, then the phone being muffled as Stiles shouted (presumably down the stairs), "Hey Dad? Can Steve come over for Thanksgiving?"

Steve couldn't hear the Sheriff's response, but then Stiles said, "See? Dad says you can come!"

Steve swallowed, and tried not to let the stinging in his eyes spill down his cheeks.

The next day, Fury looked smug when Steve told him he was taking leave during the Thanksgiving holidays.

He was going to need it to go to California.


	10. (Steve) Blood as Red as Mud

> **This ficlet was inspired by[this](http://nyxelestia.tumblr.com/post/150281886170/hi-nyx-so-long-time-fan-of-your-winter-wolves):**   
>    
>  _Hi Nyx! So long time fan of your Winter Wolves. Love the interaction between Stiles & Cap, ESPECIALLY the part with the inhaler. So I wanted to share this with you. Since I was little, I loved to draw and paint. One thing on my paper could be 15 shades of blue. My dad loves me works, but I started drawing black and white stuff for him because of his colorblindness. Recently, we got him those new glasses that corrects colorblindness. And it's like he was seeing drawings for the 1st time. I cried._   
>    
>  _So rereading Winter Wolves, I started to cry again. Because STEVE ROGERS WAS COLOR BLIND TOO. And the thought him coming out of the pod to see an entire spectrum of color that wasn’t there before just kinda breaks my heart. And now it can be fixed with a pair of (admittedly expensive) glasses. So when I was reading, I just kept thinking ‘omg, Steve, STEVE! Another one of your issues that could now be fixed’. Technology is amazing. What are your thoughts?_

Steve was skimming the science section of his morning newsfeed when he first saw the little news article about them. Thinking they were a little too good to be true, he called Stiles up and blurted out, “Are these real?”

“Are what real?” Stiles asked.

“Glasses for color-blindness?”

> **They are!**
> 
> ****

“Uh…” Steve heard the sound of Stiles clacking at his keyboard and clicking his mouse. “Yup, they’re real. Not widely known just yet, and not available for all color-blindness types just yet, but they’re real."

"...huh," Steve said, dropping his fork onto his plate.

"People with color-blindness have all the cones and rods - uh, the color-seeing bits in their eyes?" Stiles continued explaining. "But they’re just sensitive to the wrong wavelengths and activating when they shouldn’t. So these glasses filter out the weird wavelengths in the middle so the cones activate only when they’re supposed to.”

> **From the[MIT Technology Review]():  
> **   
>  _Most people have three types of color-sensing cones in their eyes: red, green, and blue. The wavelengths of light that these three cones absorb have overlapping regions. Color-blindness is often a result of a malfunctioning cone that causes wavelengths to overlap even more, resulting in poor color discrimination. The EnChroma glasses use a filter to cut out these overlapping wavelengths, allowing for a clearer distinction between colors, especially red and green._

Steve swallowed, staring into his almost-empty breakfast plate.

“…wait,” Stiles said. “You were color-blind, right?”

Steve nodded, then remembered he was on the phone. “Yeah, I was.” He swallowed. “Made art school a nightmare for me.” He snorted, remembering his stunned walks through his old streets with his new eyes. “I had no idea that this was what people saw all the time. Things made a lot more sense, now. Especially Bucky.”

> ****

“Bucky?” Stiles asked. “How did he make more sense just because you could see him more?”

“It wasn’t that I could see him more, it was that I could see what he saw more,” Steve said. “I can see scrapes and bruises and blood, somewhat, but not - not the way I do now, or most people in general do. They’re not particularly vivid, when you can’t see red. So, y'know, I’d get into all sorts of fights, I’d get beat up and I’d come home bleeding…I could never understand why anyone would worry just from taking one look at me.”

“You were red-green color-blind?” Stiles said.

“Yeah,” Steve said, setting down his fork to continue scrolling his way through the science article. “I was in a set accident on one of the USO shows. I got banged up enough that the bruises and scrapes were still there when I got to the dressing room for a clean costume, and this was the first time I’d really bled a lot since Rebirth. I saw myself in a mirror, and I realized that this was what my ma and Bucky and his ma and sisters saw whenever I got into a fight or got hurt.”

> **Couldn't find an image with actual blood ~~and I don't have enough Photoshop skills yet to make one~~ , but to give some perspective on red-green colorblindness:  
> **  
>   
>   
> Hence the title of this chapter/update.

“And suddenly, it made a lot more sense?”

Steve snorted. “Yup. Bucky used to make fun of me for it all the time, once I mentioned this to him. Every time he’d get hurt in the field and I so much as pointed it out, he’d shove it in my face yelling, 'See? _See? See what I mean?_ ’. The Howlies used to crack up every time, and asked me if I could see what my blushing looked like when I was colorblind.”

> **Part of my recurring theme of Bucky being the one to "test" Steve the most/of Steve testing out his new abilities in fun, humane ways. I've seen a lot of really angsty fics about Steve feeling like a lab rat even after "becoming" Captain America/going into the field, or any kind of testing or exerimenting always being a Bad Thing that only "evil scientists" would do. But you know that phrase that the only difference between science and goofing off is whether or not you write it down? Yeah, the only part the Howlies neglected to do was write it down, but I can't imagine Steve wouldn't want to be the one testing his new limits and pushing his new body to the max...and whatever Bucky's feelings are on the matter, I can't imagine that he wouldn't be right behind Steve every step of that way.**

Stiles laughed. “Could you?”

“A little bit, but not much,” Steve answered.

“Probably just as well you couldn’t get a date until after Rebirth,” Stiles said. “Imagine all the lipstick that would’ve been wasted on you.”

Steve laughed so hard, his stomach hurt. “Y'know, that sounds like something Bucky would say.”

> **This is just part of my recurring theme of Stiles "unintentionally" sounding like Bucky. >:)**


End file.
